


my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder

by dustyveins



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternatively Titled: Steve Harrington and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Bisexual Steve Harrington, Child Neglect, Families of Choice, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, Lots of conversations, Marijuana, Multi, Mutual Pining, Platonic Cuddling, Recreational Drug Use, References to deceased characters - Freeform, Robin Buckley is the light of my life, Slow Burn, Steve Harrington is a gem, Steve Harrington wears a crop top because I am not a coward, Steve Harrington-centric, abuse of ellipses, over use of dreams as a plot device, this is not as sad as it probably sounds, you ain't seen nothing yet kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:03:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 48,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22883740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustyveins/pseuds/dustyveins
Summary: Let me tell you a story about love.Everyone talks in varying combinations.  There are many different ways to love someone, or to be loved, or to show it.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers & Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Steve Harrington & The Party
Comments: 39
Kudos: 226





	my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder

**Author's Note:**

> First things first, endless thanks to [Kyra](https://twitter.com/deviiscrime) for putting up with me, providing feedback/proof reading, and being an absolute gem at all times.
> 
> This started out as my NaNoWriMo project for 2019 and it was meant to be an homage to Billy Joel for various personal reasons but then it kind of spiraled out of my control and I ended up editing out the bulk of the Billy Joel references, but there are a few sprinkled in there still.
> 
> Title is from Lover, You Should've Come Over by Jeff Buckley, which did not influence the content of the story in any way but I listened to it during the third round of editing and thought This Is It.
> 
> A few notes on characters:  
> We are not given solid birthdays for anyone (as far as I can tell), so I kind of guessed based on my limited knowledge of zodiac signs because why not. As such, I have placed Nancy's birthday in December of 1967, Jonathan's in September of 1967, and Steve's in August of 1966. Those are really the only ones that really come up in the story, so the others are only really notions in my head.  
> This story is not a continuation of any kind of my last Stranger Things fic, but if you want a little insight into my personal characterization of Steve Harrington, feel free to check out [these tornadoes are for you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20069596), where I get sad about Steve Harrington for nearly 3k.
> 
> All quotes are from various Richard Siken poems because I cannot help myself!
> 
> Finally, I did like kind of minimal research re: historical accuracy so all the books/music/movies mentioned would have been available when this was set, but may not have been available in Indiana at that time. Also, I have never been to Indianapolis and I did not look at a street map so. I made up an independent movie theater and bookstore. Okay go forth and enjoy!

_We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up._

_\--_

They’re getting high in his room. It should have been fine, really, there’s no reasonable explanation for him to lose it with a little weed and a fucking Billy Joel song. But sometimes things just get to him, they always have. He had gotten enough shit for being sensitive when he was younger that he learned to bury it down, but there’s something about Robin that just makes him spill his guts.

The guts that get spilled go a little something like this: Billy Joel is telling the story of a couple that got married too young and fell apart and the story is as inconsequential and mundane as picking a bottle of wine and Steve feels small and inconsequential laying sprawled out on his bedroom floor and he can’t help it: it all comes spilling out unbidden.

“This would have been us,” Steve says, rolling his head back and forth against the bed.

“Huh?”

“Nancy and I. If we’d stayed together, we totally would have ended up like these poor schmucks.”

“I don’t think that’s true, honestly,” Robin replies. She nudges her wrist against his shoulder, and he opens his eyes to see her waving the joint at him.

“It totally is. I would have asked her to marry me, and if none of this had happened, she might have even said yes, and then we would have had a totally disastrous marriage and ended up as gossip at some shitty dinner party.”

“Okay, well for starters, you’re like totally loaded so you wouldn’t have had money problems, and Nancy seems really dedicated to becoming a reporter, so she’d probably make you into her trophy husband or something anyway, so right off the bat that’s wrong. Honestly, this is probably going to be Tommy and Carol’s eventual fate.”

Steve exhales slowly and closes his eyes again. He can’t even say she is wrong about that – if Steve didn’t know any better, he may have thought that Billy Joel had time traveled back to the 70s to tell their story. He feels the negative pit growing in his stomach. “That’s not the point, Rob.”

“Lead me to the point, then, buddy, because I’m kind of lost here.”

“I’m trying to say that it never would have worked and it’s for the best that she cut me loose. I was like the dead weight on her life. Jonathan’s going to be some crazy successful photographer and she’s going to be this incredible reporter like… like that fucking guy, I don’t remember his name, that guy she used to talk about all the time, it doesn’t matter. She’s going to be _successful_ , like seriously successful, they both are, and what am I going to do? My current career trajectory is, like, video store manager, and I probably couldn’t even do that very well.” By the end of it, Steve is getting pretty riled up, he’s sat up from his half-strewn position on the floor, he’s looking at Robin who’s staring back at him upside down with an increasingly furrowed brow. He’s feeling mad with the pent-up emotion, like if he doesn’t get it out _right now,_ he may never get it out at all.

“Steve,” Robin protests, rolling over and propping herself up with an elbow. He’s still got the joint in his hand, and it’s wasteful to let it burn down like this. He glances at it and decides to stamp it out, leaning over a few feet to the plate he put at the foot of the bed next to where he had been sitting for this very purpose.

“Robin, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m glad that Nancy was smart enough to get out fast and not let me waste anymore of her time, that’s all.”

“Steve, I think you’re selling yourself a little short here.”

“Agree to disagree, I guess.”

“Steve, seriously. You’re a great guy, a catch, honestly, and Nancy would have been lucky to be with you. You would have been lucky to be with her, too. It sounds like you were really happy together before.” Steve scoffs at that but Robin presses on. “I’m serious, Steve. Before the Demogorgon, when you were just normal teenagers being dumb together, it sounds like you were really happy. I wish I had had something like that, y’know? And even after, when you talk about what it was like to be with her? It sounds like you two had some really good times together. I think she really cared about you, Steve. I think she still does and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She doesn’t know how to be your friend because she’s got all this… stuff, all these memories, all this baggage between you. Anyway, I guess all this is just to say that you wouldn’t have ended up like some anecdotal fictional couple in a Billy Joel song because you are more than that by far. You’ve got these lives that nobody could even imagine, and you had them before hell opened up beneath you. You’re special, Steve.”

Steve’s kind of caught speechless by the earnestness of her statement. He blinks hard a couple times, caught in the fogginess of his brain.

“Thanks, Robin,” he says, and it feels inadequate. It feels like it’s not nearly enough for what he’s feeling, like he should be building her monuments or at the very least singing her praises back to her. The song has changed and he feels like time is slipping away from him.

“And if you want the manager job, you might have to actually fight Keith to the death for it,” she adds, settling back down to lie across the bed, settling on her stomach this time instead of letting her head hang off the end of end. He thinks, absently, that she may have been getting dizzy. He knows he would have been.

“Oh, great. I can’t even get the mediocre job of my sad depleted dreams.”

Robin shrugs. “Maybe not, but hypothetical Nancy the successful reporter would have made you her house husband, and I’m sure some other career lady will be up for the challenge. You have a thing for smart, driven women, I can tell that much already.”

“Why do you know so much about me and Nancy?”

Robin’s shoulders seem to get tense for the briefest of moments before she shoots him an easy smile that makes him think he imagined the tightened set of her muscles. “You talk a lot when you’re high, my friend.”

“I do not!”

“You do too,” she replies with a laugh. “What do you call this little outburst if not an overshare of epic proportions?”

“You know what? I don’t know how I feel about this friendship anymore. I don’t know if we should keep hanging out.”

“You’ve said that about a million times in the last six months, Steve, don’t think I don’t see right through you. If I could shake you off that easily I would have by now.”

Something like that from any friend he’s had before would probably make his stomach twist uncomfortably, the fear of rejection settling in, but coming from Robin, with her telltale smirk, he can see it for the joke that it is. She’s right, too: he’s made that joke about a million times and he has never followed through on it. He probably never will, either. He doesn’t know how he made it this long without being her friend and he doesn’t know what he would do without her now. He’s made better by her friendship and he doesn’t think he could ever thank her enough for that. He wants to say it out loud but he’s worried about it getting lost in his mouth, all tangled up around his tongue, meaning lost or broken up on the way out like so many of the things he says.

Instead, he settles for, “honestly, Rob, you’re never going to be able to get rid of me now, you waited too long. I’m like a stray dog.”

“Yeah, I should have known better.” She’s got one arm folded under her chin and she’s looking at him in this soft way that makes him feel warm. Not in the skin tightening way Nancy used to make him feel, but something softer. It’s a feeling he wants to crawl inside of, live within, and he feels like maybe that’s something he can have, eventually.

He’s got this idea of them moving far away from Hawkins, Indiana. Maybe he’ll follow her out to college, and they can get an apartment together. Maybe they can live the lives they would never get to live here. Maybe they can do the things he doesn’t let himself think of here because to think them would be to become comfortable and to become comfortable is to make mistakes.

He doesn’t bring it up right now, and he doesn’t know when he will, but Robin’s looking at him in that way that makes him feel like she can see right to the very core of him, and he hopes.

It feels, sometimes, like maybe she’s thinking the very same things as he is and not saying them either, but the things they leave unsaid between them are not nearly as insidious as the things he and Nancy would leave. These things don’t fester in the silent places, they bloom. They don’t talk about getting out of Hawkins yet, but they’re going to. When it feels a little safer. When it doesn’t feel like jinxing the few months they have left.

He thinks Chicago could be nice, or even Indianapolis. They are not quite far enough away for his tastes, but the idea could grow on him. Maybe even New York, if they play their cards right. It’s far from Hawkins, far from being able to help if something happens, but he refuses to let this town keep him forever. He doesn’t think he’d need a whole lot to be happy, honestly, just the people he loves to be safe and maybe even a roof over his head. That would be an added bonus, he guesses.

He leans back against the wall, kicks his legs up onto the bed next to Robin’s head and laughs when she shoves them away in disgust. He feels good here, happy and wanted and warm. Right now, this moment in his bedroom in tiny Hawkins, Indiana, with its gateways to hell popping up at every corner? This is enough for him.

It settles him, knowing that she cares. Steve is a simple guy sometimes, he doesn’t need a lot. Most of the time, all he needs are people.

\--

The thing is, he tries not to lose his shit every time they’re alone together, he really does, except he’s always on edge these days and Robin is just really easy to open up to. But he doesn’t want to interrupt her when she’s doing her homework and he’s supposed to be working too, so he chews on the end of his pencil and tries to think about five strengths that don’t have anything to do with monsters.

Steve tries to focus, he really does. He tries to keep his mind on one thing at a time, but he has trouble. And college applications are boring. And it’s been months or 19 years, depending on how you look at it, and so it’s been taking up his attention a lot lately and he just wants to tell her already.

Steve lets his eyes cut over to Robin and then dance away again, taps his pen against his leg and runs his free hand through his hair.

“You okay over there, dingus?” Robin asks, tone playful. Steve looks up at her and he knows he probably looks frantic, wild eyed. That’s how he feels, anyway. Robin’s brows furrow.

“Steve, what’s up?” she asks, closing her homework into her textbook and shifting around to face him. It’s a physics book. She reaches over and slides the application out of his loose grip along with the notebook he had been using as a portable writing surface. He drops his hands onto his bent-up knees now that he doesn’t have anything to do with them. He takes a deep breath in through his nose and then lets it out again. How did Robin do this?

He figures she just… started talking, so he thinks maybe that’s what he should do too.

“I’m kind of freaking out,” he says, running a hand through his hair again. She nods encouragingly. “I just… I feel like there are secrets that nobody knows about me, you know? And I feel like those secrets are going to, to eat me alive if I don’t tell someone. It’s like I don’t even know myself, these days. So how can someone else get to know me?”

“I know the feeling,” she says softly.

He looks back up to her and his breath catches in his throat; it feels like he’s choking. She’s got this turn of her brow that feels personal. It feels like a lot of things.

“Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense,” he says.

“Anything you want to tell me about?” Robin asks, voice calm and expression unassuming. Steve’s mind is racing, forcing him through imagining a hundred different possible scenarios.

“I don’t. Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, Rob.”

“Yeah, I get that, too.”

“I’m not… I have never said it out loud. Not even to myself.” Not for lack of trying, however, and he does remember late nights, home alone, staring at his own face in the bathroom mirror and trying to form the words or see it in his own eyes; trying to figure out if anyone else could see it.

“It can be really tricky to admit the things you don’t want to be true,” Robin says, reasonably.

“Guess so,” he replies. Robin chews on her bottom lip for a moment before saying anything else.

“A long time ago, I started to notice this weird thing about myself. All my classmates started talking about boys, some of them even talked about you,” she says, voice tilting up with the corners of her lips in a teasing sort of way. “But I didn’t care. I tried telling someone, once, that I didn’t think about boys that way and I couldn’t imagine I ever would, and they called me a loser and then said that I’d grow into it eventually but until then I should just fake it so nobody else would know what a loser I was.”

“Who said that to you?” Steve asks, shifting around to mirror her position.

“My cousin. We were pretty close, back in the day, and then this thing happened. This difference erupted between us. I didn’t know what was up with me, I didn’t know what made me different, but I knew that I couldn’t talk to her about it anymore. Do you get what I’m saying?”

Steve shrugs. “I’m not sure.”

“I’m saying that sometimes, things can happen that make us think we have to hide, that we’ll never find someone we can talk to, but that’s not true, Steve. There’s always going to be someone, eventually. I figured out what my secret was and now I get to share it. I just have to figure out who I can share it with first.”

“Did you tell anybody else?”

“Besides you, you mean?” she says with a smirk.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, Steve, I’ve told someone else. But that’s kind of a non-issue, now, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, shaking her head.

She’s got this smile on, this sad little twist of her lips, and it aches in his chest. He wonders if they’re dead, this other person she spilled her secrets to. It’s not unlikely, given the high death toll around Hawkins these days. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they just got out. Moved away or something and they lost touch. Something about her face makes him think that’s not the case, though.

“Sure,” he says because he doesn’t want to press. He says it lightly, like it doesn’t matter, and he guesses it kind of doesn’t. Not right now, at least. She can keep her secrets as long as she needs to, he gets that.

“I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that if you need anything, I’m here for you. No matter what the secret is, no matter how big or impossible it feels, no matter how much it feels like something you’ll never be able to tell anyone: I’m not going to call you weird or a loser and I’m not going to ditch you. Whenever you’re ready, I’m here for you.”

Steve’s quiet for a few beats, unsure of what to say. Robin reaches over and lays a hand on his wrist and he feels the warmth of it kind of spreading up his arm, but it’s probably in his head. Steve’s got his secrets that he hasn’t told anyone, he didn’t have a cousin that he spilled it to and he doesn’t have some maybe-dead former confidante. He doesn’t know what that’s like. But right here, right now? She’s offering him a lifeline and he really wants to take it.

“The thing is, I kind of get what you mean.”

“Which part?”

“The part about secrets that feel big and impossible. I feel like my whole life has been full of big and impossible secrets.”

“Kicking around a big house like this, I can see how they might fester.”

“Fester,” he repeats, not like a question. Robin hums, considering. It’s something they do: Robin doesn’t try to simplify her vocabulary for him, but if he doesn’t understand a word, he’ll repeat it and she’ll define it. He’s learning a lot more this way than he ever did from the scolding he got when he failed vocabulary tests in school. He is starting to realize, now, that maybe embarrassment was not an effective learning tool for him.

“Get worse. From ignoring it,” she supplies.

“Oh. Yeah, like I know that I could never tell my parents.”

“Steve,” she says, back to cautious now, but he’s building steam, heart racing again. His face feels warm like maybe he’s turning red.

“My dad he… he says all these things. I know I’ve told you before that he’s a real asshole, but the thing is I’m not just complaining that he made me get a summer job or whatever, you know? I don’t care about that, I kind of like the work, as boring and awful as it can be.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s more like. He’s got all these opinions,” Steve looks away from her again, gulps, picks a spot on the carpet and fixes his gaze there. He’s gesturing around with his free hand, a wild attempt at driving his point home. “He says all these things and objectively I know he’s wrong, but they really… they get to me, sometimes. Right in here.” He rests his pointer finger on his chest and he still can’t bring himself to look at her.

“I mean, he voted for _Reagan_ , for God’s sake. Sometimes it feels like I’m going to explode from all the pressure, like he’s going to call me… well, like he’s going to say some things that are a little too close to true and I’m just going to die. It’s like he can see it, like it’s a brand on my forehead and he knows, and he’s disgusted.”

“Steve, are you,” Robin trails off and he finally looks up at her. He feels like his expression must be cracked open, raw, radiating his thoughts out into the universe. Robin looks like she’s lost for words.

“Yeah, Robin, I think I am,” he says, voice cracking slightly. He swallows around the lump in his throat.

“Oh.”

“I know, right? Not only did he get an idiot for a son he got one who likes boys, too,” Steve sighs, almost a huff of laughter, even. He looks away again, slumps back against the wall. “I’ve never said that out loud before. Not even in the mirror.”

“You’re not an idiot, Steve,” Robin says. Steve rolls his head against the wall to look at her and smiles, bemused.

“Kind of not the point of the conversation at hand, Robin, but sure.”

“Well there was a lot to unpack in that sentence, so I had to pick a place to start.”

“So you chose to refute the already proven fact?” Refute: to deny or contradict.

“Nothing is proven, Steve. You’re not an idiot. Kind of a dingus, sure, but you’re plenty smart.”

Steve huffs out a laugh at that. “Yeah, okay. Why don’t you tell that to any teacher I’ve ever had?”

“There are more things to life than books, Steve.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Robin scowls.

“Dude, seriously. Being good in school isn’t the only way to be smart. You know how good you are with people? Given your track record in high school, your capacity for empathy is… kind of shocking. You are kind, Steve Harrington, despite all attempts to prove otherwise.”

“Alright, Robin. I’ll start doing daily affirmations.” Affirmation: emotional support or encouragement. This one was something she liked to joke about, liked to say she sat in front of the mirror every morning just saying “you are totally awesome,” over and over. She always said it with an eye roll, but sometimes she told him she thought it could help with his whole low self-esteem thing. Apparently, hiding it under mountains of fake self-confidence wasn’t exactly a “healthy alternative.”

“Not calling yourself dumb anymore would be a good start,” she tells him.

“I’ll give it a shot,” he says, smiling. “You don’t have anything to say about the other thing?”

“I guess not,” she replies. “I mean, I can’t say I’m not surprised.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Steve, you are the guy you always have been. Nothing you can tell me would get me to stop seeing how protective you are, how kind, how much you care about the kids and Nancy and Jonathan and me, even. You’ve got enough heart to give Joyce Byers a run for her money.”

“Against all odds, huh?”

“Yeah, little rich kid who just wants to care about people? Unheard of,” Robin says, settling in against the wall next to him. She puts her head on his shoulder and he rests his head on top of hers.

“I’ve always tried to be a trendsetter,” Steve reasons.

“And, in case you weren’t sure, I don’t mind the other thing. You can like whoever you like and I’m going to support you in that, too. We’ve all got things that we don’t want other people to know, maybe they scare us or embarrass us or we think they’ll scare or embarrass the people we love, but I’m not scared and I’m not embarrassed. You can like boys and girls and be normal, they’re not mutually exclusive.”

“Eh,” Steve says, shrugging again and smiling to himself. “I don’t know. Normal is kind of overrated anyway, I guess.”

“In this town? Normal has a different definition.”

Steve laughs and closes his eyes, a smile spreading across his face. He’s got secrets, sure, but this is one less. One more person who knows him. He squeezes Robin’s hand and she squeezes back.

The college application can wait a little longer, community college will be there later. Right now, all that really matters to Steve is this moment, this little pocket of honesty that he’s in now.

Of course, Robin cracks a joke to break the moment.

“I know that strengths question has been killing you; you could put kindness and Olympic level overthinking as your top two.”

Steve barks out a laugh and shoves her off of him, but she cackles and collapses back against his side immediately.

_\--_

_The enormity of my desire disgusts me._

_\--_

Two weeks later and Steve has been tasked with helping to carpool the kids up to see Will and El and Joyce for Thanksgiving. They don’t necessarily need the extra car, but Dustin asked him to come and it helps to solve the luggage issue, which is exacerbated by the amount of food they volunteered to bring with them. The thing is, Steve really wants to go. He’s just not so sure that everyone else wants him there. Except for Dustin, obviously.

Nancy has Mike in her car because Mike more or less hates Steve still, which Steve thinks is kind of unfair, but he’s rolling with the punches for as long as they keep coming. Nancy also has the food and some birthday gifts for El, who decided she would celebrate her birthday as the day she got away from the lab for good. They hadn’t given her a birthday to celebrate, and she knows the day Terry Ives gave birth to her now, but she says it doesn’t feel right. Steve isn’t going to begrudge her the right to pick her own birthday. He’s pretty sure that she and Will are telling their new classmates that they’re twins, though, so maybe she has a family birthday and a school birthday. Maybe she’s still figuring out the whole birthday thing. It’s possible that she understands how birthdays work but she just really likes presents. Steve respects that.

Lucas and Max are in the backseat of Steve’s car, possibly on one of their off-again stints if the stony silence is anything to go by. Dustin is in the front seat, flipping through the radio stations.

“Can you just pick one please?” Steve says, swatting at Dustin’s hand on the dial without looking. There’s traffic on the interstate and he doesn’t want to lose sight of Nancy because he doesn’t think there’s any chance that Dustin is a good navigator.

“Fine, spoil sport,” Dustin says, and Steve can see him scowling and crossing his arms out of the corner of his eye.

He left it on some top hits station where the announcer is promoting some concert or another and then it happens: _Tell Her About It_ comes on the radio. Now, Steve Harrington has never been one to turn down an opportunity to irritate the kids, and this is the best opportunity he’s seen in a while to do it.

So he sings along.

There’s a chorus of groans from the kids and he cranks up the volume.

“You’re like our weird embarrassing dad sometimes,” Max shouts at him. He rolls his eyes.

“I’m not nearly old enough to be your dad, maybe your older brother,” Steve says, and then he’s launching into the chorus at full volume before any kind of uncomfortable silence call fall over the car because Max _had_ a weird older brother already, and he was really shitty at it most of the time. When the chorus ends, he pauses to say, “this is a great song and you should all be singing along too.”

“I’ll turn the radio off, Steve,” Dustin threatens, but he makes no move for the dials, so Steve just smirks at him.

“I know all the words, Henderson, you can’t escape it that easily.”

“I should have gone with Mike,” Lucas groans.

“And miss out on the party car? Get real, Sinclair.”

Steve glances up at the rear view and Max is looking out the window, hand in her palm. She’s trying to cover up a little smile, but Steve can see the corner of it peaking through and he feels warm all over.

“This is some good advice, boys, listen up. This guy is married to Christie Brinkley, so he must be doing something right,” Steve says, eyes back on the Wheeler’s station wagon. Nancy’s got her turn signal on, trying to merge into the exit lane for a rest stop, so Steve follows her off. “You want to keep a girl, you have to tell her. Pretty simple stuff, right Max?”

“Don’t do this to me, man,“ Lucas groans.

“Yeah, honesty seems pretty simple to me, Steve,” Max says.

“This is so dumb,” Lucas replies. Steve glances at his rear view just in time to see Lucas throwing his arms up in exasperation.

“I’ll tell you what’s dumb,” Max starts, but Dustin cuts them off.

“Seriously, this isn’t the time to argue about what color bandana Lucas said he was going to wear today.”

“That’s what you two are fighting about?” Steve asks, incredulous. He turns the volume down as the song switches to something by Tears for Fears.

“It’s about the _principle_ , Steve,” Max says, like it’s obvious.

“Oh, sure, the principle. But what exactly does a bandana have to do with principle?”

“If he can’t even tell me simple things, how do I know he’ll tell me the bigger stuff?”

“Seriously, Max? I changed my mind at the last minute!”

Steve pulls up to a gas pump and throws the car in park. “Listen, you two. There are two sides to this story and both of you think you’re right, but have you considered that this argument is dumb and neither of you are right?”

“Steve!” Max protests.

“Listen. I don’t know why he even told you about the bandana in the first place. This whole thing is silly. He didn’t lie, Max, he changed his mind. Lucas, tell her next time. You’ve got the walkies, it’s pretty easy. As for the two of you combined? High school is tough but you don’t have to participate in the petty drama, you’ll be okay, I promise.”

Max rolls her eyes. “Fine. Sorry for getting mad, Lucas. I had a bad morning.”

“Sorry for getting mad back, I should have asked,” Lucas replies. They both sound incredibly grudging, but he’s going to count it as a win anyway.

“Good,” Steve says, unbuckling himself. “Now I’m going to send you three in for snacks, and I’m going to hand my credit card to Max because she’s the most responsible one.”

“Hey!” Dustin and Lucas protest in unison. Max is smirking and leaning forward with her hand out.

“I said what I said, gremlins. Max is in charge and if you try to buy anything dumb, she’s going to stop you. Also, get me $20 on pump three. Do that first and then get the snacks after so I can pump while you’re inside.” He hands her the card and a twenty dollar bill and gets out of the car.

The kids all tumble out and start heading for the door, arguing indistinctly amongst themselves.

“Hey!” he calls over. All three of them whip around to look at him and he points a stern finger at them. “Behave in there or I swear.”

“Okay, Steve,” Dustin says. He rolls his eyes. Steve is tired of teenagers, he really is. Did he roll his eyes that much at their age? Does that not hurt their heads? Why does his inner monologue sound so much like this dad? It’s distressing.

He leans against his car and waits for the pump to activate, nods at Nancy who’s a few cars away. The machine lights up and he starts pumping, and he is just about to finish when the kids run up to him again.

“Mike doesn’t believe that you were singing,” Dustin informs him, crashing into the side of the car.

“Don’t dent my car,” Steve says.

“Yeah, okay, but tell Mike you were singing in the car,” Dustin says, sounding impatient.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He puts the nozzle back in its holster and closes his gas cap.

“Steve!”

Steve shrugs. “I’ve never sung in my life.”

Mike, little brat that he is, rolls his eyes so hard Steve is a little worried he’s going to get stuck like that, and there he goes again, co-opting his dad’s snarky criticisms.

Steve bends down to whisper to Dustin, “What happens in the party car stays in the party car, Henderson.”

Dustin shoves at his shoulder and they both laugh.

“I don’t even care,” Mike says.

“About what? Hey, Nance, you ever heard me sing?” Steve calls over. She looks confused for a second, but she must pick up on the way he’s trying to hint with his eyebrows because she smiles in just the way that he can practically see the twinkle in her eye from here.

“Never, I just kind of assumed you didn’t know how,” she calls back. “Gotta have some flaws, right?”

Steve smiles broadly back at her and then looks at Mike. “See?”

“You’re so _annoying_ ,” Mike says, rolling his eyes again.

“Yeah, right back at ya, nerd. So what did you guys get?”

Max thrusts the bag at him with a smile and he takes it. The bag has chips and candy and a Billy Joel cassette. _An Innocent Man._ Steve has the record but not the cassette. He smiles, reaches in to pull it out.

“What?” he says with a laugh.

“For the drive,” Max says.

“I can’t believe they had this,” he says, flipping it over in his hand to look at the back.

“Yeah, they had this little box of tapes by the register, I just wanted to see what they had.”

Max is bouncing on her heels and her eyes are bright. Steve knows that look.

“Thank you, Max. I’m putting this in right now.”

Max looks pleased, she flushes a little and tucks her hair behind her ear. Steve’s familiar with seeking approval and not getting it, he’s familiar with looking for it in the wrong places. He’s happy to give her what she’s looking for if it means she doesn’t start looking in those wrong places.

“Alright,” Nancy shouts over. “Everyone stretched their legs enough? We should get this show on the road.”

“How much farther?” Lucas asks.

“About an hour,” Nancy answers.

“Perfect!” Steve exclaims. “We have enough time to listen to this all the way through.”

Lucas groans, Dustin sighs, and Max just keeps on smiling.

“See you later,” Mike says, practically fleeing the scene.

“The party car rides again,” Steve announces. Nancy’s laugh floats over to them as she gets into the driver’s seat and Steve feels… something, he’s not sure what, exactly. Something good, though, he thinks.

\--

The rest of the drive is spent shouting lyrics back and forth because, while the kids put up a good fight, it turns out they know almost all the words as well.

They get to the Byers house and the kids are laughing and buzzing and humming.

“I guess you really _were_ the party car,” Nancy says, coming up behind him and elbowing him lightly in the side.

“Of course we are,” he replies with a smirk. “Want some help bringing things in?”

Nancy shrugs. “Let’s get the kids to do it. What else are they good for, right?”

“Yeah, I was thinking the exact same,” Steve says. He raises his voice a little to call out, “Alright, gremlins, round up.”

“You know, Steve, sometimes I wonder why we keep you around,” Dustin teases, smiling at him.

“It’s for my car. And my killer relationship advice,” Steve says. Four sets of eyes roll at that, which, rude, Mike wasn’t even there.

“It’s for Robin,” Lucas replies. Steve scoffs as Max nods along like she agrees.

“Whatever. Whatever, that’s definitely not why, but alright. Go grab things from the station wagon to bring inside.”

The door bursts open and Will and El come running out, which spoils their plans a little bit because with all the hugging, they forget about the food.

Nancy and Steve watch it all while leaning back against the side of his car and they let Joyce hug them and examine their faces and hug them again when she comes outside a minute later. Joyce gives the best hugs, surprisingly strong even though she’s a tiny woman.

“Where’s Jonathan?” Nancy asks, laughing as Joyce finally lets her go. Joyce sighs, put upon but fond.

“He’s at work, of course. I told him he wouldn’t get home in time but he kept insisting that he would, and will you look at that! He hasn’t made it.” She’s smiling and Steve feels warm all over, like he’s home.

“Well, he gets to miss out on all of this, so it’s his loss, really,” Steve says, and Joyce rubs his arm. He’s feeling very mothered by it all.

“I’m going to go make sure the kids made it all in one piece,” Joyce says, and she walks away with one more squeeze to both of their arms.

They don’t get much time in silence because as soon as she’s gone, Will and El are buzzing around their feet. El hugs Nancy tightly and they start whispering to each other, but Will just stands close to Steve looking like he’s about to jump out of his own skin.

“Oh, come on, Byers, get in here,” Steve says, pulling Will into a tight hug. He just keeps getting taller and taller, soon he’ll probably be taller than Jonathan.

“You came!” Will exclaims into Steve’s shoulder.

“Of course, I came,” Steve says, mildly affronted, holding Will at arm’s length. “You think I’d miss out on the opportunity to chauffeur a bunch of preteens around?”

Will laughs and rolls his eyes, looking flushed. “Yeah, I guess not.”

“Yeah, and I missed you guys,” Steve amends, bumping Will’s shoulder with his fist. It’s that thing about approval again, creeping in the back of his mind. Will smiles and looks away.

“Where’s Robin?” El asks, brows furrowed. Steve turns to her with an exaggerated scowl.

“Yeah, good to see you, too, El,” he replies. “Do I at least get a hug hello before you tell me about my inadequacy as a guest?” Inadequacy: lacking something.

El’s smile is wide and she practically throws herself at him, hugging him tightly. “Thank you for coming, Steve,” she says. “Now where is Robin?”

“She’s at home with her family, jeez!”

“Why?”

“Because she is.”

“Did you ask her to come?” El presses.

“I didn’t know she was invited!”

“Of _course_ she is, Steve, _jeez_!”

Steve smiles at that shift in cadence that she takes up when she’s repeating something she heard someone else say.

“Alright, well next time I’ll ask her if she wants to come, but for now you’ll just have to settle for me,” he tells her, ruffling her hair.

“Good,” she says, and ducks in to hug him again, face bright and happy. He’s not sure if that good was because she’s glad he’s here or if it’s because she’s happy about the idea that next time it won’t just be him. He’s opting to think she’s glad he’s here. He’s missed her and Will and Joyce so much since they’ve been gone. Jonathan too, even if he feels weird when he thinks about it too long. Nancy nudges him with her elbow as El and Will skitter away again.

“They really like her, huh?” Nancy asks.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Steve laughs. “More than they like me, that’s for sure.”

“Ah, that’s not true. They like you plenty.”

“They like my car and the fact that I’m friends with Robin,” he corrects.

“Friends?” Nancy replies, brows raised.

Steve doesn’t have a chance to respond to that because the kids crowd them again, pulling at their arms to come inside.

“They’re giving us a tour!” Dustin shouts.

“Go grab the things out of the car!” Steve shouts back.

“Fine!”

Joyce ushers Steve and Nancy inside after they grab their overnight bags and Will and El help the kids grab the food and their own overnight bags.

The house is small but homey and comfortable looking and it smells like food.

“You guys didn’t have to bring so many things,” Joyce says, wringing her hands. “I know I’m kind of hopeless in the kitchen, but Jonathan prepped some things and walked me through what to do while he was at work.”

“We just wanted to help, Joyce,” Nancy says kindly, gripping the strap of her bag.

“That’s so nice of you all,” Joyce says. She looks tired in a happy kind of way and it’s nice to see her smile. She didn’t do that much in the months before leaving Hawkins. Too many memories and too much death. They still haven’t even taken down the Radio Shack sign, and there are pictures of Hop everywhere. He doesn’t blame her.

The kids burst through the front door, cracking the relative silence in the house with their laughter and their almost-shouting. Will and El lead them into the kitchen where they put everything away with a surprising amount of efficiency. Steve would be suspicious, but they’re just so excited.

“Okay, tour time!” Dustin announces.

“Show everyone where they’re sleeping too, okay?” Joyce asks, settling down in the arm chair.

“Got it,” Will says, bouncing a little. “Let’s go!”

He takes off down the hall and starts pointing at doors, declaring two of them bathrooms, one Jonathan’s room, one El’s room, one Will’s room, and one Joyce’s room.

“Mike, Lucas, and Dustin are going to stay in my room with me. I have a bunkbed and a blow-up mattress. Max will stay with El and,” Will flushes a little. “Mom says Nancy can stay with Jonathan because she knows you’d probably just sneak in there anyway.”

Nancy laughs a little uncomfortably, a blush creeping up over her cheeks, and the kids giggle and Steve doesn’t say anything at all.

“Wait, where does Steve sleep?” Dustin asks.

“Well, that’s kind of the problem,” Will says. “Mom keeps insisting he can take her bed and that she’ll sleep on the couch and then Jonathan says that _he’ll_ sleep on the couch and then mom argues that Nancy and Steve wouldn’t want to share a room and then it just goes around and around.”

“I don’t want either of them to sleep on the couch, though,” Steve says, waving a hand. “I’ll sleep on the couch, it’s fine.”

Will shoots him a look that says Steve’s really in for it now. “Alright, well you can tell her that and see what happens.”

“I will,” Steve says. “I’ll go right now.”

“Yeah, okay,” Will says, shrugging. “Everyone else can come put their stuff down.”

When Steve gets back to the front room, Joyce is sitting with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Steve clears his throat gently and she sits up, smiling when she sees him.

“What’s up, honey?”

“I just wanted to say that I’ll sleep on the couch. I don’t want to put you guys out.”

Joyce furrows her brow at him. “You’re a guest, Steve, I don’t want to put you on the couch all weekend.”

“I really don’t mind, Mrs. Byers, seriously. I want you to sleep in your own bed. If you insist on sleeping on the couch, then I’ll sleep out here on the floor,” he says, smiling a little.

“You can call me Joyce, honey,” Joyce tells him, for what must be the hundredth time. Maybe it will actually stick this time around, but probably not. He’s got these certain rules of etiquette just hammered into his brain by sharp, whispered scolding’s.

“If you insist, you can sleep on the couch. But if you get so much as a crick in your neck tonight, _I_ am insisting you sleep in a bed tomorrow,” she tells him, sternly, a finger pointed in his direction.

“Yes ma’am,” he says, nodding seriously. “Can I use your phone while they’re all figuring themselves out over there?”

“Oh, sure, honey. It’s mounted on the wall right over there,” she says, pointing towards the doorway into the kitchen.

“Thanks,” he says and heads over. He punches in the number and then takes the phone into the kitchen, the wire stretching out as he leans on the counter.

It only rings twice before someone picks up. “Steve?”

Steve smiles up at the ceiling. “How many people did you do that to before you got me?”

“We don’t get that many calls,” Robin defends.

“How many?”

“Three,” she admits, and Steve can practically hear the amused smirk on her lips.

“Not bad. Did you think I was going to arrive 15 minutes after I left Hawkins?”

“I don’t know, maybe you got lost and needed to call me from a pay phone. You’re helpless without me.”

“Speaking of how much I need you, El is pissed because I didn’t bring you with me.”

“I told you those kids like me more than you.”

“Yeah well they like my car more than both of us so who’s the real winner here?”

Robin laughs. “Still me, dingus. So what’s it like?”

“It’s nice, homey. This town looks like Hawkins but with fewer monsters roaming the streets trying to kill us all so I’d say it’s about one hundred times better here. Cheaper to live, too, I think. Maybe we should pick up and move here.”

“Who’s we?”

“You and me, I dunno.” Steve shrugs. “Maybe we could take the kids with us.”

“I’ve been looking for a way to get arrested for kidnapping, actually, so I’m in.”

Steve laughs again. “So how are things over there?”

“Erica came to see me today.”

“Is that so?” Steve asks. He shifts around, tucks the phone between his ear and his shoulder, and crosses his arms.

“Yeah. She said she wanted to cash in on my promise of free ice cream for life, but I know the truth. She loves me.”

“Of course she does, Rob.”

“She asked me about you.”

“Did she now?”

“Yeah. She asked me what I was doing hanging around a nerd like you.”

“First of all, I’m not a nerd.”

“Yeah, alright, whatever. Anyway, I told her I just can’t seem to shake you off.”

“That’s a fair assessment of my character, I cling.”

“I’ll say. So what happened to you today?”

“Max bought me a Billy Joel tape,” Steve says. Robin laughs.

“You and your Billy Joel tapes! Which one was it?”

“ _An Innocent Man._ She found it in a bin at a gas station.”

“A trash bin?”

“Don’t act like you don’t love Billy Joel, I see right through you. I can literally hear you listening to him right now, is that _52 nd Street_?”

“Don’t start with me, Harrington, you made this happen,” she scolds, but it sounds like she’s trying hard not to laugh.

“Steve?” Nancy calls, and half a second later she leans in through the kitchen doorway. “Jonathan just pulled up.”

“Oh, thanks, Nance. I’ll be right out,” Steve says, smiling at her.

“Okay,” she replies, smiling back.

“I have to go, Robin. Call you tomorrow?”

“You better,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I might go stir crazy here without you.”

“Yeah, you love me. Bye,” Steve teases.

“Much like the kids, I love your ability to give me rides places, actually,” Robin replies. Steve rolls his eyes and she laughs her way through saying goodbye and hanging up. Steve walks the phone back to the cradle and hangs it up. Jonathan’s just coming in the door. Steve takes a deep breath and files away Jonathan’s loosened tie for later assessment.

“Hey,” Steve says.

“Hey,” Jonathan replies with a nod. He smiles at Steve and Steve smiles back. It’s going to be a long weekend.

\--

The kids are very excited to see Jonathan. Not as excited as they were to see Will and El and not as excited as Nancy was to see him, but pretty excited. Steve would be a little offended, but he’s going to chalk it up to the whole _distance makes the heart grow fonder_ thing.

El is pretty annoyed to find out Steve called Robin without telling anyone when Joyce calls him over to ask if the call went through okay.

“Call her back!” El insists.

“El,” Joyce warns.

“Please,” El amends, looking pretty thoroughly chastened.

“Maybe tomorrow, kid, I just let her go. She misses all of you, though. Lord only knows why.”

“Fine,” El replies, looking disappointed.

Jonathan and Nancy are sharing a capital-L Look with each other that makes Steve’s stomach do flips. He looks away from them and settles onto the couch.

“I’m going to go finish cooking,” Jonathan says in that quiet way he has.

“Thanks, honey,” Joyce replies with a smile. She reaches out and squeezes his arm on his way past, like she’s making sure he’s real. Steve gets that, sometimes he needs a physical reminder that Dustin and Robin and Erica are real, that they made it out of the mall. Before that it was the tunnels, but he couldn’t do much about the fear that haunted him then, he just had to live with it and trust that it would go away, trust that his reality wasn’t some sick nightmare.

“I’ll go with,” Nancy says, trailing after Jonathan. “I’ll help with the things we brought.”

Steve finds his eyes catching on them again, feels that same little twist in his stomach that feels an awful lot like jealousy. He thought he was over it, with Nancy. Thinking about her doesn’t make him ache the same way anymore, but maybe it was just wishful thinking all along. All he knows is he wants to follow them and he doesn’t want to admit that, to himself or to anyone else.

He averts his gaze and finds Will watching him from his spot on the floor, leaning against Joyce’s armchair. Will’s got this curious tilt to his head, like he’s trying to work something out, solve some puzzle. Steve shifts a little in his seat and smiles tightly at him. Will is a smart kid and Steve is a little afraid of whatever he’s figured out, or whatever it is he thinks he has figured out.

He lets himself slide into the buzz of the kids catching up and telling each other about what high school has been like. Steve knows for a fact that they talk on the phone all the time, but he kind of gets their need to recant all the gossip in person anyway. It’s not the same over the phone.

He leans over to Max, who is next to him on the couch, and says, “hey, you alright?”

“Why?” she asks, lacking the heat that usually has when people ask her personal questions. Steve shrugs.

“You mentioned in the car that you had a bad morning. Just wanted to check in.”

“I’m alright,” Max says, looking around like she’s making sure nobody else is listening. “Things are still weird at home. I think Neil is just trying to pretend he doesn’t have any kids now, so he’s been ignoring me. My mom doesn’t really care what I do as long as I don’t make Neil angry, so. I don’t even think they cared that I left this morning.”

Steve grew up with parents who were trying to pretend they didn’t have any kids, who were never around even if they were physically present. He was also there at Billy’s funeral, standing next to Max who was leaning into her mom’s side. Neil wasn’t there. Susan had twisted some story about how he was too overcome with grief to bare leaving the house, but Steve knew it wasn’t true.

“That’s shitty,” he says bluntly. Max shrugs like it doesn’t matter. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Thanks, Steve,” she says, voice small. It’s something, at least.

\--

Dinner is delicious, of course, because Jonathan has really figured out his way around a kitchen and Nancy learned from her mom. Everyone eats and talks loudly and fills the whole house up with this love, this warmth, that Steve is kind of obsessed with. He thinks that it’s probably always like this in the Byers house, even if it’s a little quieter when it’s just the four of them. They’re a quiet bunch, but they love each other so much it can be heard around the world.

Steve wants this forever.

Everyone stays up too late talking and laughing. Joyce is the first to go to bed, begging off so she can be rested for work the next day. Nancy and Jonathan are next, hands clasped together, and Steve is Not Thinking About It. The kids start “ooo-ing” at them and Jonathan blushes but Nancy just rolls her eyes.

Soon after, though, the kids leave too, leaving Steve alone in the living room with nothing but the reading light, the blankets, and some pillows to keep him company. He considers raiding their bookshelf just for something to do, but his head aches just with the thought of the words swimming across the page the way they always do. He sighs and just lies down, flipping off the light and trying to keep his eyes shut.

In the near-dead silence of the house he can hear the kids whispering, and he has a sneaking suspicion that El and Max are in Will’s room with the boys. He thinks that, for Joyce’s sake, he should probably care, but he just can’t be bothered to play bad cop right now. He wants to call Robin but doesn’t want to risk waking her parents in the process.

The house creaks and he rolls onto his back, sighing at the ceiling. He doesn’t know how much time passes before the doors down the hall open and close and there’s shuffling and then silence that indicates the kids have decided to go to sleep.

It’s another indeterminate amount of time before a door opens again. He hears soft footsteps heading in his direction and he closes his eyes, not particularly wanting to be caught in his terrible insomnia spiral right now. His eyelids burn red when the kitchen light flips on and then the water starts running. Steve cracks his eyes open and sees El standing there, looking frazzled and clutching a glass of water.

He sits up and calls over to her softly.

“Hey, you alright?” he asks. She jumps a little, like he startled her, and he feels bad about that.

“Bad dreams,” she says, her mouth twisting up. “Why are you awake?”

Steve shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.”

She approaches him now, back-lit by the light coming through the doorway.

“Did you have bad dreams too?”

“Not tonight, I’d have to fall asleep for that. But sometimes.”

“Oh,” El says. She sits down in the armchair almost directly across from him, the one Joyce had staked out earlier.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks. El shakes her head, but then starts talking anyway.

“Sometimes I see Hop. In my dreams, I mean. And it’s almost like it’s real, like I’m…”

“Like the deprivation tank stuff?” Steve guesses. He’s never seen her do it, but he’s heard about her ability to see others when they’re not around her. He wonders what it’s like.

“Yes.”

“And that scares you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t real but I want it to be.”

“Where do you see him?”

“In this… room. A cell. He looks bad, sick. Tired. Sometimes there’s shouting but I can’t understand it, and it’s far away, like the other side of a door.”

Steve almost wants to ask how she knows it isn’t real, but he isn’t cruel, or at least he tries not to be anymore. But somehow, it’s like she read his mind. Like maybe she can just see it on his face.

“I know it isn’t real because my powers don’t work anymore. I can’t see when I’m awake. But I also know what gone means. Hop is gone, not like Mama. Like Barb, or Bob, or Billy. Gone.”

Steve feels winded, like her simple, matter of fact explanation has stolen all of the air out of the room. She looks sad but a little angry, too.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, but it feels inadequate. _He_ feels inadequate.

“It’s like my dreams want me to see the worst, I don’t know how I created it. It just won’t leave.” She shrugs helplessly. “What about you?”

“What?”

“Your dreams. What are they about?”

“Uh,” Steve replies, weighing his options. But then he thinks about how she gave him this huge thing, how she let him see it even though she didn’t have to and maybe didn’t want to. So he shares.

“I see a lot of different things. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I don’t go back into the Byers’ house that first night, way back then, and I hear the… the Demogorgon rip Nancy and Jonathan apart.” Steve swallows hard, his throat suddenly dry. “Sometimes I’m not quick enough and the demodogs get us in the bus or in the tunnels. Sometimes it’s the lab and I have to… Sometimes they get Robin and they make me watch her… go,” he finishes, feeling a bit embarrassed about all his stops and starts.

El looks sympathetic, her brown eyes wide. She puts her now empty glass down on the coffee table and comes around to sit next to him. Maybe it makes it easier for her to share what she does next.

“Sometimes,” she says, hardly above a whisper, “I can hear Billy screaming, and it seems so real that I don’t know where I am anymore. Sometimes it hurts so much, like it was me too.”

Steve is left speechless again. He hesitantly drapes an arm over her shoulders, giving her a chance to back away from him, to get the hell out of Dodge before he touches her. She doesn’t leave, just leans into his side a little.

He wonders if this is what having a sister would have felt like, wonders if he somehow managed to unofficially adopt a whole gaggle of younger siblings over the last few years. He doesn’t really find that he minds.

“What do you do when you have nightmares?” she asks.

“I listen to music, usually,” Steve tells her. “Or sometimes I’ll call Robin, but only if I fell asleep and had a bad dream during the day. If I call her at night her parents will get mad.”

“What do you listen to?”

Steve shrugs, careful not to jostle her too much in the process. “It depends on the day, but I listen to Billy Joel a lot. Listening to him makes me think of when I was young and that makes me feel a little better usually, because things were different then I guess.”

“Billy Joel,” she repeats, weighing the name in her mouth. “Jonathan doesn’t talk about him.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah, I wouldn’t think so. Probably a little too mainstream for him.”

“Main stream?” she asks, tilting her head up at him a little in curiosity.

“Like… popular,” he supplies.

“Oh. Jonathan doesn’t like popular.”

 _You can say that again,_ Steve thinks. Not that Steve can particularly blame him for it.

“No, no he does not.”

“Will says that it’s cool to be uncool.”

“Will is completely right.”

“Were you popular?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

Steve smiles wryly. “You guys happened,” he says, tipping his head down to look at her and squeezing her shoulder a little. “You changed my life, showed me what was really important.”

“Not popularity?”

“Nah,” Steve says. “Love. Friendship. Fighting monsters. That’s the stuff that really matters.”

“Oh. Yeah, Mike says that sometimes.”

“Mike is a pretty smart kid. Don’t tell him I said that, though,” Steve tells her. She laughs a little.

“I won’t. Unless he asks, because friends don’t lie.”

“Yeah, that’s true. He probably won’t ask, though. Pretty sure he hates me.”

El shrugs again. “He doesn’t hate you. He’s just worried you will leave, and Dustin will be sad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He told me,” she says, matter-of-fact, and Steve is left speechless once again.

He wants to keep this so badly, and he’s so scared it will slip right through his hands.

“I’m scared of that too.”

“That you will leave?” she asks, face scrunching up in confusion. Steve shakes his head.

“That you all will.”

“Oh,” El says. He hums in response while she thinks it over. “You know they won’t, right?”

Steve shrugs again. “Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, I’m not really like them, or like you. I can be a jerk and I don’t have the same interests.”

“They can be jerks, too, sometimes. And me,” she says, leaning back into the couch and taking him with her. “And you try to be interested, like when you play D&D with them sometimes and do all those voices, or when you have movie nights. Or when it was your birthday and you let us all come over, even Nancy and Jonathan, instead of having a big party like Nancy said you usually do.

“They like you, Steve, we all do.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say to that, left speechless over and over again by this girl who is wise beyond her years, who has seen things that nobody will ever understand, done things that are unfathomable (unfathomable: not able to be believed, kind of).

“Yeah, alright,” he says softly. “For what it’s worth, I’d never abandon them either.”

“Yeah, because you’re a good guy now,” El says. Her tone leaves no room for disagreement.

When eventually she goes back to bed, Steve’s heart feels lighter, and his mind too. She smiles at him when she goes, and she looks like she feels lighter too.

When he closes his eyes this time, he falls asleep quickly.

\--

He wakes up to the sound of the shower running and some light clanging in the kitchen. The sun is bright and when he gets up he only has a few tight spots in his back. He stretches out to crack his back and then heads to the kitchen and Jonathan is there. He smiles when he sees Steve.

“Morning,” he says, settling in at the stove.

“Morning,” Steve replies, leaning on the door jamb.

“I think the kids are still asleep. Nancy’s in the shower and Mom went to work already, she left a note,” Jonathan supplies, gesturing towards the fridge door with his spatula. Sure enough there’s a note held there by a fish shaped magnet with Joyce’s messy handwriting telling them when she’ll be back and not to get into too much trouble.

“Thanks. Is there anything I can help with?” Steve asks, running a hand through his hair. Jonathan just looks at him for a second, something on his face like confusion or surprise, maybe. Steve hunches his shoulders a little, embarrassed that he assumed Jonathan would want him hanging around here. “Or I could just get out of your hair,” he amends, hooking his thumb over his shoulder. Jonathan seems to shake himself a little.

“Sorry, uh. Could you whisk up the pancake mix, actually? The directions are on the box.”

“Sure,” Steve says. Jonathan smiles tightly, nods, and turns back to the stove, where he seems to be scrambling eggs for a small army, which might just be enough to feed the kids.

They work in relative silence, just the general noise of cooking and the hum of the refrigerator between them, until the shower shuts off.

“So how have you been?” Jonathan asks.

“I’ve been alright, you know. Just working. Robin has me applying to community colleges near the schools she’s applying to, so hopefully I get into one, you know?”

“Oh. What will you do if you don’t?”

Steve shrugs and looks over to see Jonathan watching him, eggs being left slightly ignored on the stove.

“I’ll just wait another year, I guess. Get a job wherever she wants to go and try the whole application thing again later. I don’t know, really. The eggs are burning,” Steve says, and Jonathan jerks like he forgot he was working on them and hurries to stir them around. They’re a little darker than is ideal, but they don’t look too bad. “What about you?”

“I got a new job here, just one this time. It’s less expensive to live here than in Hawkins, which is basically a steal since there are no monsters here,” Jonathan trails off a little, the _that we know of_ implied by his tone. He’s afraid to jinx it, and Steve gets that feeling, he really does. “Anyway, I like my new school. Things are kind of different here. I joined yearbook, met a few people.” He shrugs. “Yeah, it’s nice.”

“It sounds like it. Are Will and El adjusting okay? I talk to them on the phone sometimes, but you never know.”

“Oh yeah,” Jonathan replies, brightening considerably. “They’re practically inseparable. They keep telling people they’re twins, which has varying degrees of success every time.”

“Varied based on what?”

“Usually people ask about their last names and they tell them not to be rude. Nobody knows their birthdays, and they’re keeping them under wraps for the joke or whatever, so that doesn’t spoil it for them. Yeah, usually it’s the name thing.”

“That’s pretty funny, actually.”

“Yeah, those two are real crack ups. El’s really liking school, too, so Mom’s pretty grateful to that doctor for making it happen. El needed something, you know? A win.”

“Yeah, for sure.” Sometimes, in conversations with Jonathan, Steve feels like he can’t find any words. He just finds himself repeating the same responses over and over, and he worries that Jonathan will take it as some kind of insult, a sign of boredom. But really, Steve just likes to hear him talk.

“This school has a really good art program, too, so Will likes that a lot.”

“He’s going to be crazy famous someday, I just know it,” Steve says with a small smile aimed down at the pancake mix, the whisk resting against the side of the bowl.

Jonathan smiles, private and proud. “Yeah, yeah I hope so. You done with the mix?”

“Oh! Yeah, totally.”

Jonathan slides the eggs onto a big serving platter and sticks the whole thing in the oven to keep warm. He takes the bowl of pancake mix from Steve and sets to work on those.

“Can you grab me another platter?” Jonathan asks, pointing at a cabinet. Steve grabs it for him. “So how’s Robin?”

“She’s good,” Steve says, leaning back against the counter and watching Jonathan work. “She’s applying to a bunch of schools right now which she’s pretty excited and nervous about. She’s teaching herself Russian because of course she is. Apparently El is really mad I didn’t bring her here, so I have to call her later and let El speak to her.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Hmm?”

“Bring her, I mean.”

“Oh. I wasn’t sure if that would be okay. I didn’t want to just bring her to someone else’s house without permission, you know? And asking about it felt weird. Rude, I guess. And it was probably for the best, the sleeping situation here is already a little cramped.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Well next time you can bring her, we’ll figure it out.”

“Thanks, man. We’ll see I guess.”

“Things between you are pretty serious, then, huh?” Jonathan asks, plating the first batch of pancakes (which don’t look burned, which is a kind of wizardry Steve admires) and not looking at Steve at all.

“What?” Steve asks, brows furrowing, but Nancy chooses that exact moment to enter and the mood of the room shatters into something different. Not worse, but certainly not the same. She walks right up to Jonathan and leans into his side and -

Steve had started to feel comfortable in a room with Jonathan, but he feels off balance in this room with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend and the way they look at each other like they’re in love and it’s easy to be. Steve used to think he and Nancy had that, but it turned out he was wrong. He wonders, sometimes, when he can’t seem to get to sleep, if he was just so hard to love that she gave up. For him, loving her had been easy.

“I’m going to go wake up the kids,” Steve says, tearing his eyes away from Nancy’s lips on Jonathan’s cheek. He’s got this pink flush to his face like he’s embarrassed and surprised even after they’ve been together a year. Nancy looks at him like she didn’t realize he was there, which hurts. He flees the room.

\--

Thirty minutes later, they’re all gathered around the Byers’ kitchen table, chairs squished in tight to fit them all. Steve had to bribe El and Max with a promise to call Robin after breakfast, but the boys were easier – he mentioned pancakes and they practically bowled him over in their haste to get to the bathroom and get ready for the day.

They’re serving out pancakes and eggs and bacon when Max speaks up.

“Steve, you should go get your tape and we can listen to it now,” she says, smiling sweetly.

“What’s your angle?” Steve asks suspiciously.

“I don’t have one! I just want you to enjoy your gift,” she insists.

“What tape?” Jonathan asks.

“Max bought him a Billy Joel tape yesterday,” Lucas says.

“Why?” Nancy asks, brows furrowed.

“Because he likes Billy Joel,” Max says, shrugging. Steve rolls his eyes fondly.

“You bought it with my own money, so I don’t think you qualify for sainthood just yet.”

Max rolls her eyes. “Whatever. You should go get it, though.”

“Jonathan doesn’t like Billy Joel,” Will says, breaking away from the whispered conversation he had been having with Dustin and Mike. Probably planning some new D&D campaign or something. Steve wonders if they have something planned for this trip and if they’ll ask him to do the voices for it or not.

“That’s okay,” Jonathan says. “You should go get it.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at that. “Why?”

Jonathan shrugs. “It might be nice. Plus,” he adds, with a smirk, “I’m working towards my sainthood status, so I figured I should start doing some acts of charity.”

“Ha ha, Byers, you’re hilarious. You ever considered doing stand-up?”

“I have, actually. Go get your tape,” Jonathan insists, scooping some eggs onto his plate. He’s got this teasing twinkle in his eye, the closest to friendly he’s ever really gotten with Steve, and it makes Steve feel weird and pleased in a way he isn’t thinking about. He’s already got a long list of things he isn’t thinking about. If all of the moments he’s filed away for later investigation were real, the whole filing cabinet would be full by now. He hesitates a moment more before nodding.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, sliding back from the table. “I’ll be right back.”

The fresh air is brisk, the chill in the air having just the slightest bite to it that sets him almost on the verge of shivering. He slipped his sneakers on but he didn’t put on a jacket and the cold air worms its way up his sleeves. He has to turn the car on to pop the tape out and he takes a moment to just sit in his front seat and take a deep breath while the tape ejects. He wants to do so many things he doesn’t know what he wants anymore. He feels embarrassed by the idea of listening to an artist he loves in front of people who don’t love him too. Embarrassment isn’t something he quite grew used to, he didn’t show himself to any of his old friends in a way that might have been embarrassing for him. Now, in front of all these people he’s desperate to keep, the prospect is terrifying. He wants to run from this moment, not go back inside, but he also wants to live in this forever and never leave.

He sighs and takes the tape out of the deck, turns his car off, and heads back inside. They’re talking loudly about something to do with… comics, maybe? when he comes back inside. He kicks off his shoes and walks into the dining room, holds the tape up.

“Got it,” he says. Max smiles brightly.

“The player’s in the family room, just by the doorway opposite the phone,” Jonathan tells him, so Steve goes over to pop the tape in. He turns the volume knob up a little, so they’ll be able to hear it in the other room and then he heads back and tucks into breakfast.

“What song is this?” Nancy asks. She’s using her trying-to-be-polite head tilt, and it feels weird to be on the receiving end of it.

“ _Easy Money_ ,” Steve tells her, fighting the urge to clear his throat uncomfortably. He drops his left hand to his knee instead of running it through his hair.

“Cool,” Nancy says, nodding. Sometimes it feels like she’s trying so hard to be his friend that it might actually kill her. Sometimes it’s easy, but times like this it feels like the year they were together sits between them like a brick wall: impenetrable. He misses when things were easy between them, he really does. That makes it feel like it might just end up killing _him_ in the end.

Steve thinks that maybe it’s easier to be friends with Jonathan because they don’t have the same history. They’ve got something less complicated, more angry, and that makes it less difficult to climb over into friendship. One time, after the whole thing happened with the mall, Jonathan had asked Steve about Robin and Steve said that they were pretty close now.

“Because of the whole… you know,” Steve had said, gesturing vaguely. Jonathan had nodded and got this weird look on his face.

“Shared trauma,” he had said. Steve’s pretty sure Nancy had blushed, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense but made Steve feel very strange, embarrassed that he was not party to what was clearly an inside joke between them – or maybe not a joke, but some understanding they had.

“Sure,” Steve had said, shrugging. “Shared trauma.”

Jonathan nodded sagely and shifted on his feet and Nancy had politely said, “Well, we have to get going, but thanks for hosting movie night!” and then they were off to some date or something and Steve was left with the kids watching Indiana Jones ( _Temple of Doom_ , he was almost positive) for the twentieth time. Robin was making them dinner (probably) and he had said as much which is, he supposed, what prompted the question.

He has found himself, pretty often since that night, wondering about that exchange. Wondering about the strange expression on Jonathan’s face, the pretty pink flush of Nancy’s cheeks. He wondered if they talked about him when he wasn’t around, but he also wasn’t really sure he wanted to know the answer. Just in case the answer is no, or worse, the answer is yes. Not that he would blame them for having unkind things to say about him, but he’s not sure he could handle it if he were to find out that their overtures of friendship were fake.

He told Robin about this fear, once, and she slid closer to him and said, “their loss, then,” and he laughed a little and didn’t believe it for a second.

He loves Robin, not in the least because she seems to love him just for the hell of it. Steve’s had a lot of friends who liked him just because he had money or just because they thought he was good looking or just because he had a pool, but Robin liked him because he made her laugh. He likes himself because he makes her laugh, too. He feels like a better person because he knows her, because he talks to her and learns from her.

He’s drawn from his pondering by Jonathan.

“What do you think, Steve?” he asks.

“Hmm?” Steve replies.

“We want to go to the park,” Nancy says, smiling kindly.

“Oh, okay. Yeah, that sounds nice.”

“Call Robin first,” El insists.

“El,” Jonathan says, raising his eyebrows.

“Please,” El says. She smiles brightly at Steve and he huffs a laugh.

“Yeah, alright,” he says. “I’ll call her now. Anyone else done? I’ll take your plates.”

“Oh, no, I’ve got it,” Jonathan says, standing up at the same time as Steve.

“Oh, sure, thanks.”

Jonathan takes some of the empty platters and plates and heads for the kitchen. Steve heads for the phone.

He dials Robin’s number, which he had memorized months ago, and waits for it to ring.

“Buckley household, this is Robin,” she says when she answers. Steve breaks out into a smile.

“What, you didn’t sense it was me this time?” he asks. Nancy raises her eyebrows across the room but doesn’t look at him, which he knows is her attempt at pretending she’s not listening to him. Robin snorts.

“My parents got mad that I was being rude to people who called, as if they weren’t mostly telemarketers.”

“Yeah, that’s fair, I guess. I got yelled at for not letting El talk to you yesterday, she’s practically vibrating in her seat right now, actually,” he tells her.

“Well what are you waiting for, Harrington? Pass the phone to someone I actually want to talk to.”

Steve scoffs and says, “The disrespect you’re paying me is unbelievable, I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. El, come take this phone from me please.”

El practically leaps out of her seat and skips over to him to take the phone, chattering eagerly from the second she has it. Steve walks back to the table and sits down. He hears El say something about how Robin absolutely _needs_ to come next time and that they’d figure out sleeping arrangements even if Steve had to sleep on the roof. He rolls his eyes. The kids all get up to gather around the phone and try to listen in and shout commentary at Robin at every chance.

“You seem happy,” Nancy says lightly.

“Yeah, guess so,” he says, smiling down at his hands. “I just… I like it when everyone gets along. I like that things are settling down.”

“Hmm,” Nancy responds.

“You seem happy too,” he says, looking up at her. She smiles that tight smile she gets when she’s quietly pleased.

“Yeah, I am. I missed him, you know? And all of this too.”

“Yeah, I can tell. It’s the way you look at him,” Steve says, glancing away from her quiet smile and towards the kitchen. He feels a stir of longing in his chest, and he doesn’t want to admit that he’s not sure who it’s for.

“Steve,” she starts.

“So where’s this park?” he asks, and she purses her lips but lets him change the subject anyway.

“Just a few blocks away. Jonathan likes to go there to take pictures.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It does, doesn’t it? He’s been talking about it since he moved here.”

“I talk to the kids, but I haven’t really talked to Jonathan until now,” Steve shrugs. “It’s hard, I guess.”

“Steve, Robin said to ask when you’re going to take us all to see Billy Joel,” Max calls over, grinning cheekily.

“Tell her to bring me a funding plan and then we’ll talk,” Steve calls back.

Max repeats it into the phone and then laughs. She doesn’t bring anything else back to Steve.

“So you two spend a lot of time together, huh?”

“Yeah, you know, at work and stuff. I pick her up from school sometimes.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Have you?”

“Yeah, a few times. Your car is flashy, hard to miss.”

“I’m picking up the kids sometimes too.”

“Yeah, sometimes. And sometimes I’ve got them.”

“Right, of course.”

“So do you… I mean, is it serious?”

“Is what serious?” Steve asks, brows furrowed.

“Come on, Steve,” Nancy says, sounding exasperated.

“I’m being serious, Nance, I don’t know what you mean.”

“You and Robin,” she presses. Steve sighs and rolls his eyes, throwing his head back to dial up the drama a little.

“Seriously? How many times do we have to talk about this? I keep telling you, Robin and I aren’t-“

Nancy sighs again, a little huff of indignation. Steve recognizes that move, too. It means she doesn’t like to be lied to and that if he doesn’t stop soon, he’s going to hear it for sure. The problem is he isn’t lying.

“Hey, gremlins. Are Robin and I dating?” Steve calls over.

Mike fakes a gag, Lucas outright laughs, Dustin shouts out a “hell no,” and Max says, “Ew! She’s way too cool for you,” with her face scrunched up in disgust, which, okay, ouch?

“Robin wants to know why everyone’s shouting,” El says.

“Steve asked if you were his girlfriend,” Will takes the phone to say. He pauses for a response and then he laughs in that quiet way he has. “Yeah, Robin says ‘definitely not’.”

“Thanks everyone, this has been great for my self-esteem, you can go back to being little assholes over there now,” Steve says, turning back to Nancy. He spreads his hands out. “See?”

“You say all the time that the kids keep things from you, how do I know that’s not mutual?”

“Okay, first of all, they keep silly things from me like whether or not Jonathan has a new favorite photography park or what their grades are like. Second of all, I don’t keep things from them if they matter and if Robin and I were dating then they would deserve to know because it would affect them too.”

“So are you just… hooking up, then?” Nancy asks, a skeptical eyebrow raised.

“Oh my god,” Steve sighs, throwing his arms up in the air.

“Nancy!” Jonathan says, soft but stern, as he slides into the seat on the other side of Steve.

“What?” Nancy asks, acting innocent.

“We agreed you were going to leave it alone,” Jonathan says. “Sorry, Steve.”

“Leave it alone? There is no it! Robin and I are just friends!” Steve insists.

“Yeah, of course,” Jonathan replies. Steve’s feeling a little boxed in here between them, caught between the smell of their shampoos. They’re both close.

“Okay, we’re ready to go to the park now,” El says, rushing over.

“You didn’t even let me say goodbye to her? I’m getting rid of all of you,” Steve says.

“Half of you are in pajamas,” Nancy says.

“So?” El asks.

“Go change,” Jonathan says with a smirk. Steve feels strange and warm and the Billy Joel album is winding to a close.

They’re only supposed to be here for one more night but Steve already knows that it’s going to be incredibly long, especially if it keeps up this way. He wants to talk to Robin but he can’t do it here, not about the information that’s eating away at the back of his mind and making him feel itchy all over, and it’s making him miss her like crazy.

\--

That night, Steve finds himself lying on the floor of Jonathan’s bedroom with Jonathan and Nancy. Jonathan’s passing a cigarette back and forth with Steve and Steve feels wild from how secret it all feels.

“Do you guys ever worry that it isn’t over?” Steve asks, voice barely above a whisper like if he talks any louder he’ll crack the moment, crack a hole right through the wall into another universe and nightmares will come spilling out. He knows he has a penchant for drama, but this he has seen happen before. He holds the cigarette out in the vague direction of Jonathan and their fingers brush when Jonathan takes it back. Steve is tired enough that it feels like an electric thrill from his fingers all the way up his arm.

“What do you mean?” Nancy replies, just as soft. Steve chews on his lip.

“You know, like, what if it comes back?” he asks. Jonathan inhales sharply to his right.

“It won’t, my mom closed it,” he says. “You know she did.”

“Yeah,” Steve replies. “Yeah, I know.”

“What’s wrong, Steve?” Nancy asks. She’s always been able to see through what he says out loud to what he actually means. He tries not to think about how it makes him feel to have her still doing it now. From the corner of his eye he can see her rise, resting her weight on one elbow to look at him.

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “I guess it’s just… Sometimes it feels like… Like November never ends, you know? Like we’ll be living this forever.”

“November will end at midnight,” Jonathan says, bumping Steve’s hand with his wrist. Steve twists his fingers around to take the cigarette back. It’ll be burned out soon and Steve is still feeling twitchy.

“I know that, but... I don’t know, sometimes it feels like I’m just going to wake up from all of this and I’ll be back at the beginning but worse.”

“Yeah,” Nancy says, so soft Steve almost thinks he imagined it. She drops back down again.

“Me too,” Jonathan admits. “Sometimes, when I wake up, I think Will is still gone. Or I remember that fake body they had in the morgue, and for that moment… It’s like there’s no oxygen in the room.”

Steve doesn’t have anything like that to bond with Jonathan over, he doesn’t have a story of a lost loved one. He just has all these people who were there until they weren’t, people he thought of as peripheral constants, and then one day they got eaten. Barb. Heather. Billy. Hopper. There’s a special kind of regret that comes along with losing someone you hardly knew.

He feels like he has no right to miss them because he didn’t love them while they were alive, not the way other people did. Heather was kind and smart and unfortunate enough to be made his lab partner for a semester, but that was all he really knew about her. He didn’t know Barb like Nancy did, didn’t know Hopper outside of his exhausted face when he busted a couple of Steve’s parties and, of course, the whole monster thing. He didn’t even like Billy. But they’re gone now and it’s such an awful way to die and they didn’t deserve it. It shouldn’t have happened that way, shouldn’t have been like that, but it was. It happened and it keeps happening.

“Sometimes I wake up thinking Barb is still alive,” Nancy whispers. Steve’s heart cracks so wide open that he wants nothing more than to crawl over and hold her, but he can’t do that anymore. He rolls his head to the side and watches Jonathan reach for her hand, watches Nancy slide into his space. He longs.

He feels like he doesn’t have a right to this moment, but he can’t leave and he doesn’t want to either. He’s stuck in the middle of the things he wants and what he needs and it’s never going to end. He’s going to wake up and they will be dead too, they all will be, he’s going to wake up and discover what a coward he really was, how far he ran from them when they needed help. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to banish the image from behind his eyelids, but he’s had this nightmare so many times he can’t get rid of it – their lifeless eyes are burned into his brain.

“Steve,” Jonathan says, soft. Steve opens his eyes and Jonathan’s face is warm and bright and decidedly not dead and Steve shivers. “Pass it,” Jonathan requests, holding his hand out for the cigarette. Steve hands it to him and he takes a long inhale, his eyes falling shut. Steve’s eyes catch on the bob of his throat and then he exhales and opens his eyes and –

Steve is lost in it.

Jonathan stamps out the cigarette in his cracked ashtray and looks over at Steve.

“It ended,” he says.

“Hmm?” Steve hums back, having lost the thread of things.

“It’s midnight,” Jonathan says. “And all of it was real, for better or for worse.”

“Oh,” Steve says, feeling transparent. Jonathan has to be able to see through to Steve’s tumbled up thoughts, the tangled web of Nancy and Jonathan in his head. But then Jonathan smiles, sad and wry, and Steve thinks maybe not. He doesn’t know how he could miss it, but maybe he did.

“The nightmares are pretty awful, though, aren’t they?” Jonathan asks. Nancy props herself up with an elbow again and rests the hand that’s looped with Jonathan’s on his chest. She doesn’t say anything, just looks, just innocent curiosity in her huge eyes.

“Yeah,” Steve says, unable to look away from them both but knowing that he should. Knowing that he has to.

“They’re always bad, Steve. Doesn’t matter what you lost,” Jonathan says, pragmatic as ever. Nancy looks sad and Steve wants to brush her hair from her face because Jonathan hasn’t yet. But it isn’t his place anymore and eventually, Jonathan will. Steve feels like he’s lost things that he never even had. His chest is tight.

And that’s when the screaming starts.

_\--_

_My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling._

_\--_

The three of them practically trample each other in their haste to scramble up and down the hall to El’s room. Steve slides in his socks across the wood floor in the hallway when he tries to stop at her door. Nancy’s the first one inside and when they get in they see Max, pressed up against the wall looking thoroughly freaked, and El sitting straight up in bed sobbing, the screaming sliding into something closer to loud gasping.

Nancy and Jonathan go straight for El, followed quickly by Joyce and then the boys come tumbling through the bedroom door. Steve goes over to Max, crouching down in front of her.

“You okay, Max?” he asks softly. Max’s wide eyes are fixed over his shoulder and Steve can hear Joyce and Nancy’s soothing tones speaking softly with El. He glances over his shoulder and sees Joyce running her hand over El’s hair as El collapses into her shoulder. Steve turns back to Max.

“Max, what happened?” he asks, reaching out and laying a gentle hand on her arm. She flinches and snaps her gaze to him. He pulls his hand away quickly and holds both his hands up, palms out so she can see them. “I’m sorry, you’re okay. You’re safe.”

“Okay,” Max says, eyes cutting between his face and El over his shoulder. She wraps her arms around her knees.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asks. She shrugs a little helplessly. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Jonathan ushering the boys out of the room. Steve figures that’s a good idea, the room isn’t exactly big and it feels even smaller with ten people crowded inside.

“She just started screaming in her sleep. I turned on the light and I tried to wake her up but she kept screaming anyway and I got scared so I backed away from her. Then you guys showed up.” Her voice is soft and sad and still a little bit on edge.

“Okay. Do you want to come out into the living room with me and get some water?” he asks. She shakes her head quickly.

“I don’t want to leave her,” she says. Steve’s heart feels like it’s cracking wide open all over again.

The crying has more or less quieted down now and Joyce seems to be murmuring encouragement to El.

“Alright,” Steve agrees, nodding. “Do you want to go over there?”

Max shakes her head again. “No,” she whispers.

“Do you want to talk about… what you’re feeling?” Steve asks. Max purses her lips.

“I just…” she starts. “It scared me. I thought… I thought it was happening again or something. Or… well, I don’t know. That I was home. For a second, I mean.”

Steve’s heart drops and he settles down into a sitting position, sitting criss cross in front of her.

“Sometimes I feel that way, too. Even without stuff like this happening,” he replies. His voice feels tight but he’s trying to keep it light and even, not sure how to broach the topic of her home life. She’s dropped hints, but she always clams up if you get too close to getting details. “And I don’t always want to talk about it because it feels embarrassing, but I usually feel better after I do. Robin’s good at that kind of thing, if you want to ever talk to her. Or me. I’m always here for you guys. All of you, even Mike.”

Max snorts a little at that. “Mike hates you,” she says. Steve shrugs.

“That’s alright, I’m learning how to cope with not being well liked. Being friends with a bunch of kids is doing wonders on my ego. Very humbling,” he jokes. Max lets out another almost laugh, more just a huff of air. Steve gives her a small half smile in return.

“- and then he was reaching,” El’s voice breaks in, her voice cracking and her tone growing slightly more frantic.

“Reaching for what, sweetie?” Joyce’s voice replies.

“Me,” El exclaims with a sob. “And then he was gone, like smoke.”

Max reaches out and grabs tightly onto Steve’s arm. He lays his free hand over her hand and pats it in what he hopes is a comforting manner.

“And then you woke up?” Joyce asks. She sounds so sad that it breaks Steve’s heart for the third time tonight.

“Well I looked for him for a little while, but it was so dark and there was nothing there but me,” she says, voice thick. “And then I woke up and Nancy was here. And Jonathan and Steve, but I saw Nancy first.”

“Okay, sweetie. Do you want some water?” Joyce asks, rocking El slightly in her arms.

Instead of answering, El says, “It was just like I was telling you, Steve, but worse. He saw me this time.”

Steve stops himself from gasping but just barely, shoulders stiffening. He turns to look at her again and she’s staring right at him, eyes red. Joyce is holding her close and Nancy is holding one of her hands and both of them look confused.

“So the dreams are getting worse, then?” he asks, keeping his voice level through relatively great effort.

“You knew about them?” Nancy asks, brows furrowed. “I thought you said you didn’t talk to them about much.”

There’s something in her voice that makes Steve feel small. Max shifts around so she’s next to him, not hidden behind him anymore.

“She got up last night for water. We talked,” Steve says, feeling a little defensive.

“He told me he has bad dreams, too,” El says, soft. “And I don’t know if they’re getting worse. I didn’t have another one after I went to bed again last night. But tonight, it was worse. It felt…” she pauses, seemingly grasping for the right words. “Real. More real than the ones I told you about.”

Steve looks at Joyce whose mouth thins out. “El, I’m sorry this is happening,” she says. “We’re going to figure it out.”

El nods and swallows hard. Steve’s heart still hurts for her.

“How about Max and I go get you some water?” Steve says.

“Okay,” El says, nodding. She takes her hand back from Nancy’s to wipe at her eyes.

“Okay,” Steve says, pushing himself to his feet. “Let’s go, Max.” He holds a hand out to help her up and she takes it. By the time they get to the doorway, she’s resettled into her usual neutral facial expression. He’s kind of amazed by how tough she is, especially for her age. He knows that some of it is an act, a defense mechanism, but still. He knows a lot about defense mechanisms and all he knows is that she isn’t lashing out and that’s more than he can say for himself at her age or even now.

The boys all jump up when they reach the family room but none of them seem sure of what to say. Mike is the first to speak.

“Is she… is she okay?” he asks, tentatively. Max, mercifully, doesn’t pick a fight with him over it.

“Yeah, she’s okay,” she says. “Just freaked out because of a nightmare. We’re getting her some water.”

The kids all deflate a little at that, like the stress of the night is leaving their bodies, the adrenaline high ending, and now they’re exhausted once again. Jonathan is sitting in Joyce’s armchair looking tense.

“So what now?” Dustin asks.

“What do you mean?” Steve replies.

“Do we just… pretend that didn’t happen now?” Dustin asks.

“Yeah, how can we just leave tomorrow after this?” Mike asks.

“I’m going to grab that water,” Max says. She heads off towards the kitchen and he doesn’t blame her. Sure, they’re all here, but nobody saw it like Max did. None of them were in the room with her.

“It’s going to be okay,” Steve says, feeling incredibly tired. “Jonathan and Will and Mrs. Byers are going to take really good care of her. Especially Will, right buddy?” he asks, shooting Will a smile. Will smiles back weakly, but it’s something at least.

“Yeah,” Will says. “Twins.”

“See?” Steve says. “She’s in good hands.”

Max comes back with the water and pauses by Steve. “You going to come back again?” she asks, head tilted.

“Nah, you go on back, I’ll stay out here. The fewer people back there the better right now, probably.”

“Okay,” Max says, shrugging. He sees something flash across her face and he thinks its concern but she doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t either.

Lucas falls back onto the couch again and Dustin sits down heavily as well. Mike looks torn, like he wants to go down the hallway but doesn’t think they would let him. After what seems like a mighty internal battle he sits down on the other couch and Will sits down with him.

Steve can see on their faces that they don’t want to sleep and they don’t want to leave tomorrow morning either. He doesn’t want to leave now and he’s not sure if he’ll be able to sleep. He debates between sitting on the floor or trying to squeeze onto one of the couches by forcing one of the kids to de-sprawl, but he thinks they look too comfortable and too exhausted to move them. He opts to sit on the arm of the arm chair, bent over to rest his elbow on his knee and his head in his hand. Jonathan raises a bemused eyebrow at him, and Steve just smiles wryly. Jonathan, seeming not to care much about this turn of events, just leans back further in the armchair and closes his eyes. He’s taking steady breaths, like maybe he’s counting them. Steve thinks he recognizes the pattern as one Robin taught him.

After a few minutes, the kids start snoring lightly, having fallen asleep right there on the couches. He’s almost surprised at how tired they all seem to be but he supposes they wore themselves out between staying up late last night, all the excitement of the day, and the stress of the last half hour. Steve sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

“This isn’t it,” Jonathan says, hardly more than a breath.

Steve turns to him and whispers back, “what?”

“The upside down,” Jonathan explains. He’s got his eyes open but just a little bit and his hands are clasped over his chest, one thumb running back and forth across the back of the other. “It can’t be.”

“Oh,” Steve says. He wonders if he sounds as unconvinced as he feels, but Jonathan answers that mystery for him pretty quickly.

“It’s just a nightmare,” he says. “We all get them. It’s a pretty fucked up situation, you know? Just a bunch of teens running around with PTSD. But that’s all this is, it’s just a nightmare.”

Steve sighs. “You didn’t hear her talking about it, man,” he says. “She said it felt real, like more than any of her other dreams. She doesn’t even call them nightmares, you know? But she said he reached for her. That he went up like smoke before he could touch her.”

“Who?” Jonathan asks, looking a little pale, sitting up a little straighter.

“Hop. Hopper,” Steve says, feeling like he’s been hit. Jonathan’s face crumples. He opens and closes his mouth a few times like he’s trying to find the words for this and failing.

“It’s not fair,” Steve says. “None of it is. They’re kids.”

“Us too,” Jonathan says, a little helplessly.

“Yeah, guess so,” Steve says. He smirks then. “You more than me, though.”

Jonathan huffs a laugh, rolls his eyes. Steve’s got a smile on, twisted on his perch to look at Jonathan, when a soft voice breaks the moment.

“Hey,” Nancy says. “El and Max are going to go back to sleep. Joyce says we should all try to get some sleep too.”

Steve stands up like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. Nancy’s got this strange look on her face and he’s grateful for the dim light because he’s sure his skin is flushed.

“They’re all asleep,” he says. He runs his hands through his hair. Nancy glances around like she’s just now noticing the boys sleeping on the couches, leaning on each other.

“Oh,” she says.

“You’re out a place to sleep, then,” Jonathan says, and Steve just barely avoids flinching. He doesn’t look at him but in his head, Jonathan is just sprawled there. Steve feels like he’s overheating. Like the air has gotten a hundred degrees hotter.

“Yeah. Unless we wake them up,” Steve says.

“Don’t,” Nancy says, resolute.

“Yeah, you can sleep in my room,” Jonathan says. “We can pull the air mattress in from Will’s room maybe.”

Steve swallows hard. Runs a hand through his hair again. “What?”

“Yeah, let the kids sleep,” Nancy says. “Plus, they’re young. Their bones can take it.” She smiles and Steve doesn’t remember how to breathe.

“Let’s go,” Jonathan says softly, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder. He didn’t even hear him get up.

“I don’t want to intrude,” Steve says. Jonathan pats his shoulder and then starts walking toward the hallway.

“No worries, man. It’s late. Time for bed,” Jonathan says. He slides his hand into Nancy’s when he comes up next to her. He looks over his shoulder at Steve and tips his head toward the hallway. “Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Steve says, feeling surprised with himself but at the same time not surprised at all because if he’s honest, he doesn’t think this was an offer he ever had any chance of refusing. He follows them down the hallway.

\--

Steve wakes up on the floor of Jonathan Byers’ bedroom with the start of a migraine and a very mild crick in his neck. He sits up and Nancy and Jonathan are still asleep, curled up in Jonathan’s bed. Steve’s kind of amazed that his past self thought that this was going to be anything but a horrible idea. He also sort of wants to disappear completely. In lieu of that, he gets up as quietly as he can and heads for the bathroom to brush his teeth and splash water on his face.

Then he calls Robin.

He can’t bring himself to bring up any of the important stuff, especially not when he’s already speaking in hushed tones so as not to wake up the boys still somehow asleep on the couches, so he just let’s her talk about work for a little while.

“I’ll be back later today. You should come over after work, but I might be asleep. The key is in the planter, remember?” he asks when she finishes.

“Yeah, of course. I’m looking forward to all the things you’re going to tell me, all the non-Hawkins drama.”

“Oh believe me, it will be a doozy,” he says, laughing and looking up toward the ceiling.

“Yeah, it better be,” she jokes. Steve bites his lip and closes his eyes.

“See you, Robin,” he says.

“Bye, Steve.”

He hangs up the phone and sighs, presses his forehead against the wall. He rolls his head back and forth a few times and bites back the urge to scream. When he opens his eyes again, Will is watching him curiously from across the room.

There’s something knowing in his eyes and it makes Steve feel sweat building up around his collar again. He waves and Will waves back and that’s that.

The morning spins off away from them and the boys complain about their neck cramps for most of the ride home.

Another November has ended and they’re still alive.

\--

He’s napping when the front door closes and wakes him up. He’s still half asleep when she comes into his room.

“Hey,” he mumbles.

“Hey,” she says.

“I’ve missed my bed.”

“Me too,” she laughs. She climbs in next to him. “Go back to sleep and talk to me later, okay?”

They sleep for an hour and when Steve wakes up, Robin has put music on. It’s _52 nd Street_ which makes Steve laugh.

“Alright, sleepy head,” Robin says from her place in his desk chair, spinning slightly.

“Sorry for sleeping,” Steve replies, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes.

“That’s okay. Can I ask you a silly question?”

“Guess so, yeah.”

“What’s the deal with you and Billy Joel?”

Steve shrugs. “My mom always really liked him, so she listened to him a lot while I was growing up. I told her once that I really liked Piano Man and a few days later I came how and she had gifted me a copy of _The Stranger_. It was my first record. Listening to him makes me think about what it was like before she and my dad started leaving all the time. My mom gets every new record he puts out, it’s like a weird sort of apology for the fact that they’re never around.”

Robin purses her lips, nodding. “Yeah, alright,” she says. “Thanks for sharing that with me.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Steve says running a hand through his hair.

“So,” Robin says, clapping her hands together. “What happened this weekend?”

Steve laughs, but without really feeling any humor. “Where do I start, Rob?”

“Well why are you so tired?”

“Tough weekend. I already have trouble sleeping, you know? Turns out El does too. We had a nice conversation Friday night about insomnia. She’s been having dreams. Bad ones, about the Chief.”

“Oh,” Robin says.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“What’s she dreaming about?”

“She sees him in this room, I guess, a small one with, like, concrete walls. She says there’s always shouting coming from outside that she doesn’t understand and that he looks sick and sad and scared. She thought that they were her brain reminding her to feel guilty; she thinks if she hadn’t exhausted her powers, she would have been able to help them.”

“And you think these are just dreams?” Robin asks, leaning forward in her seat, elbows on her knees.

“She thinks they’re dreams, so I think so too.”

“Okay, but if she didn’t think that what would you think?”

Steve takes a deep breath to consider it.

“I would think it’s complicated, because it sounds like her powers. She even said herself that when she sees him it’s like when she goes into the middle place, whatever it is they’re calling it these days. But she says her powers are still out of commission. She can’t go looking when she’s awake and she can’t move anything either, she’s been trying. And then there’s what happened Saturday night. Last night, you know.”

“Something happened last night?”

“This morning, I guess. Well, just after midnight,” Steve says, feeling adrift in the same way that he did last night.

“Well what was it?”

“She woke up screaming,” Steve says with a sigh.

“Oh!” Robin exclaims.

“Yeah, I know. Everyone went running, and she was breathless and freaked out once she woke up,” Steve says. Robin sits in rapt attention as he runs back the events of the night, leaving out the parts that are not related to El.

“I hadn’t mentioned what El told me the night before to anyone, so when she mentioned my name it was… confusing for the others, I guess. But El didn’t tell anyone about the nightmares I have, and I couldn’t tell people about hers. It’s like she said, none of this is fair.”

“It isn’t fair,” Robin agrees softly. She looks shocked and sad and concerned.

“The thing is that, yeah, of course it’s just a dream, right? Joyce saw Hopper die. But it just seems so real from her description, you know? And also, Joyce didn’t actually see it. She closed her eyes, she told us that herself. She closed her eyes and when she opened them, he was gone. So who knows? What if by some crazy twist of fate, he’s actually alive? I don’t know how he would have survived but… maybe.”

Steve feels kind of silly for thinking it, overly hopeful. But Robin looks at him like he’s onto something and that makes him feel like maybe he is.

“Joyce said the blast liquified everyone in range, right?” Robin asks.

“Yeah,” Steve replies, shuddering.

“But I overheard one of the military guys saying there were no… remnants on the walkway, which is where Joyce said Hopper was. Maybe they are thinking the same thing as you, maybe… maybe something else happened to him.”

“Like what, though? Joyce said there was no way for him to get away from the machine in time, and if he had managed to do it, he would have come back to us. You may not have known him well, but he wouldn’t just abandon El like that, not if he had any other choice.” Steve feels fiercely defensive of Hopper now, like he has to make sure Robin doesn’t think he’s some kind of dead beat. Yeah, he’s rough around the edges and he can be a bit of an asshole, but he cares about the kids, especially El, and Steve is pretty sure he cared a lot about Joyce, too.

In a quiet moment last July, Steve had found Joyce sitting quietly on her front step, smoking a cigarette and staring blankly down the drive. He sat down next to her and asked how she was doing and she looked at him with tears in her eyes and said, “he was supposed to pick me up for dinner,” like it had just sunk in that he wasn’t coming back. Steve hadn’t known what to say, so he just said “oh,” unable to stop it from coming out of his mouth, and put a tentative arm around her shoulders. She had sagged against his side and didn’t say anything else and he tried like hell not to think about all the people they had lost too soon. They watched the sky burn pink and purple and didn’t go back inside until the only light came from the blinking of lightening bugs.

“Maybe he didn’t have a choice, maybe he was… stuck, in some way,” Robin suggests.

“Stuck?” Steve asks, brows furrowing.

“Yeah. Like, what if he got thrown off the platform by the force of the explosion but… I don’t know, didn’t get liquified somehow, and the Russians took him hostage? Or, you said that the first time, El got sucked into the Upside Down, right? What if Hopper got sucked in too?”

“Well if that happened then he’s definitely gone, I don’t know how anyone could survive in there for this long.”

“What if he didn’t have to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, El said he was in some kind of cell, right? And that there was shouting outside, and he looked sick?”

“Yeah, are you my echo now or something?” Steve asks, not sure where she’s going with this. She’s kind of building up steam now, gesturing kind of wildly.

“And you said that Joyce told you all this started because they were trying to access the Upside Down from Russia and they were having trouble, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“So what if Hopper got sucked into the Upside Down and then some other fucked up facility with some other gateway to hell found him in there? Or it spat him out somewhere, like when El climbed out of that wall or whatever? And then they locked him up for, like, observation or something?”

“Oh my god,” Steve says, a theory starting to slot into place. He tries not to get his hopes up because this would be an awful way to survive if it’s true, but he’s sitting up more now, his heart is racing.

“Steve,” Robin says. “What if we can find him?”

“I don’t know how we could, though,” Steve says, shaking his head, forcing himself to lean back again and manage his expectations. “We don’t have any leads, just some half-baked theories.”

“Maybe we can try to get more information from El?” Robin suggests, and then she must see something worried in Steve’s face because she immediately raises her hands to placate him and continues, “Nothing too direct, of course. I wouldn’t want to get her riled up over nothing. I would never want to hurt her more than she’s already been hurt.”

“We’ll have to be strategic about this,” Steve says.

Robin grins devilishly. “Strategy is my strong suit,” she says.

“Oh yeah, the grand strategy of ‘send a ten-year-old into an air duct to get us into a secret Russian room’? That amazing plan?”

“Shut up, Steve, you were going to try to rearrange Dustin’s limbs,” she says, laughing.

“Yeah yeah yeah, okay, so neither of us are great at this.”

“I got us the map! And I learned Russian and cracked the code!”

“We all contributed, Robin, no need to brag!” Robin laughs brightly and comes back over to sit next to Steve on the bed. She leans into his side and he wraps an arm around her.

“We’re going to figure this out, Steve,” she says.

“Yeah, I hope so,” Steve replies.

“So what else happened this weekend, aside from this mind blowing revelation of ours?” Robin asks, crossing her legs at the ankle. Steve exhales heavily through his nose.

“That bad, huh?” Robin asks.

“No, not really,” Steve says. “It’s just that… well, you know that things are tricky with Jonathan and Nancy and me.”

“Yeah, that’s one word for it,” Robin says with a snort.

“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” Steve says haughtily.

“You can go around not dignifying anything you want to, but that doesn’t stop it being true.” Steve rolls his eyes.

“Anyway, things were tense,” he says.

“I’m sure they were,” Robin says, tone shooting for reasonable. Steve pinches her shoulder which makes her laugh and shove at his side.

“Things were _tense_ ,” Steve says, with particular emphasis to bring them back on topic, “because none of us know how to be friends with each other with no one else around and sometimes we don’t really know how to be friends with other people around either. Like, we would start to have a good conversation and then we would remember who we are and it would get weird again.”

The reality of it is sitting on the tip of his tongue, the way Jonathan’s fingers brushed his over and over again, but he isn’t going to say it. He doesn’t think he can and besides, it was all proximity. It wasn’t… It wasn’t real, none of it is real. He doesn’t have to pay attention to it and he won’t.

“Yeah, alright, that’s fair. But honestly, you three just need to talk. Like, really talk about the things between you. Like the whole not-breakup of 1984 and the overlap with their getting together.”

Robin says it like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world and not the scariest conversation he could ever have with them. What if they think he’s some kind of… monster? What if they think all the same things about him that his own father has been planting in his head his whole life?

“Seriously, Rob, that’s all fine now. I told her it was fine and I meant it,” he says.

“But did you, though? I mean, honestly, Steve, did you actually think it was okay that they did that or did you just want them to be happy even at the expense of yourself?”

“Wow,” Steve says, feeling oddly picked apart by that. Robin shrugs.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that right now,” she says. She sounds contrite, which is one of the words she’s teaching him to expand his vocabulary or whatever. He tries to use them in his head even if he’s afraid to say them out loud – it’s kind of his thing. Contrite was kind of like guilty.

“No, it’s okay,” Steve says, and again he’s not sure if he means it.

“I mean, you don’t have to answer it. Just think about it, and what it means,” Robin says.

“Sure,” Steve says, mind racing. He feels unsettled. He feels… known, as weird as that is. Like he’s revealed too much about himself.

“Want to hear about how crazy Keith has been this weekend?” she asks, and he can hear the smile sneaking into her voice.

“Absolutely,” he replies, shifting around to get more comfortable.

“Okay, so, you know how we were getting a bunch of new releases in this weekend?” Robin starts. Steve settles in for her story, knowing how intense Keith gets about new releases. Steve’s a little afraid of how intensely Keith cares about this job, but he also kind of respects him for it.

_\--_

_In the dream I don’t tell anyone, you put your head in my lap._

_\--_

Steve’s working on his self-awareness, he really is. He’s working and, perhaps, failing to improve it, but the point is that he’s trying, and he thinks that’s one of the most important parts.

That being said, he is very good at ignoring things when he wants to ignore them, and that makes certain parts of his life way easier.

He, for example, was able to pretend for years that his interest in guys was the exact same level of interest all the men in his life had. He knew, of course, that this was untrue, that he had an uncommon interest in Mac Rubino’s shoulders, but if he didn’t say it out loud or even to himself, then he didn’t have to deal with it. He didn’t have to examine the nausea he felt when his friends would throw around some pretty nasty words, when they would speculate about their classmates and mock them for perceived behaviors, didn’t have to stand up to them when it was easier to play along or keep quiet.

Now, though, he’s older and (he likes to think) wiser, and he’s starting to realize that the popularity he clung to so desperately for so long is not really something he cares about or wants. After all, the popular version of Steve was wildly unhappy and got left almost completely alone whereas the current Steve, the one who voices non-player characters for a bunch of fourteen year-olds, who works at a video store and spends nearly all of his free time with his best friend who doesn’t want anything from him and has said not only to himself but also out loud to another person that he likes guys, is far happier and feels more connected than ever before.

All this to say that Steve-from-before had never acknowledged or admitted to himself that he had dreams sometimes about guys he knows. He also never acknowledged the reason he was so enthusiastic about taking Nancy to see those Tom Cruise movies so many times.

But now, self-aware Steve has to, occasionally, admit things to himself, however unfortunately.

Which is why he wakes up three days after he gets back from the Byers house and has an “oh shit” moment when Jonathan’s face is still sitting there, being blinked out of existence as he looks up at the shadowy ceiling of his bedroom.

He’s not sure how, exactly, but he’s sure that this is Robin’s fault. It’s hard to bury down inconvenient feelings when she’s encouraging him to be introspective.

He wakes up from dreams about Nancy sometimes, and he feels plenty guilty about those on their own, but now he’s got several different layers of guilt and weirdness about this because it’s not the same and it’s definitely a Bigger Thing than nostalgic dreams about his ex-girlfriend.

He can’t pretend, now, that it was just curiosity that kept him thinking about Jonathan’s loosened tie all weekend. Not when he woke up a dream that started with that little mental image.

Yeah, that’s going to take some further reflection. Steve rolls over and sees his clock reads 3:43 am. He shoves his face into his pillow and groans.

Oh shit indeed.

\--

When Steve wakes up at a more reasonable hour and remembers how he spent the wee hours of the morning, he promptly tries to smother himself with a pillow. When that fails, he drags himself out of bed and into the shower. He gets soap in his eyes, which he figures is pretty indicative of how the day is going to go.

He gets to work, his eyes are still stinging, and he’s alone for three hours before Robin comes in. He spends it shelving and suspiciously eyeing the toddlers accompanying their mothers to make sure they don’t slobber on anything.

By time Robin comes in, Steve has finally managed to blink hard enough to expel the scrubbed out, burning sensation from his eyes.

“You look like shit,” she tells him with a laugh. Mrs. Mulligan looks faintly scandalized from three aisles over and Steve smiles tightly in her direction.

“Hey, how you doin’?” he calls over, lifting a hand to wave. Mrs. Mulligan turns back to the tapes without responding.

“Watch your mouth,” Steve tells Robin, quiet but fierce.

“What’s wrong with you?” she whispers back, sliding her bag under the check-out desk.

“Go punch in and then talk to me,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. She sticks her tongue out at him and heads to the back.

Mrs. Mulligan checks out while Robin is in the back, looking displeased and pinched, checking out a copy of what might be a silent film. What Steve is really looking forward to is getting cornered with his parents at church on Sunday and getting a lecture about living life in a Godly way and picking friends that support him in that goal. Mrs. Mulligan would probably drop dead if she knew how far off her view of Godly living was from who they were. The thought of it is almost enough to make him laugh as she walks out the door.

Robin comes back out and crashes her shoulder into his.

“So what’s wrong with you? Nightmares again? Even your hair looks sad,” she says, reaching up to poke at his hair. He swats her hand away.

“Not nightmares, no,” he says, shuffling away from her to scan returns into the system.

“Then what?” she asks, pulling a textbook out of her bag. Steve glances over and sees that it’s a foreign language book; Russian, he’s pretty sure, and that isn’t part of the Hawkins High curriculum.

“You ever gonna stop trying to learn every language in the world?”

“You ever gonna tell me why you look like you slept in a ditch?” she replies, not looking at him.

“You’re being dramatic,” Steve says.

“Yeah, fine, you don’t look that bad,” she concedes. “But if you want to talk about it you can.”

“Not really.”

“Why not?” she asks, brows furrowing.

“Not here, Rob,” he says, feeling tired.

Robin freezes up and Steve realizes his mistake right away. She glances around the empty store and then turns to him and says softly, “Is this about… you know?”

“It’s not about the mall, no,” Steve tells her, putting down the tapes to turn to her, an attempt at reassurance.

“Oh,” Robin says, shoulders dropping.

“The other thing,” Steve says, eyebrows raising pointedly.

“Oh,” Robin says again, more forceful this time, more surprised. The bell over the door rings and both Robin and Steve jump, eyes snapping to the door and both of them saying “good afternoon,” on autopilot.

Nancy freezes in the doorway. “You two alright?” she laughs.

“Of course,” they say, nearly in unison again. They look at each other and laugh, an edge of hysteria to it.

“Yeah, that sounds _very_ convincing,” Nancy tells them, shaking her head. “You two are something else.”

“That’s us,” Steve says, forcing his attention back to the returns.

“Can I help you with anything, Nancy?” Robin asks, syrup sweet. Nancy and Robin are… cordial. But the first thing Nancy ever said to her was _who are you?_ and, as Robin told him, that kind of thing really sticks when you’ve been in school with someone since you were five. They ran in different circles, sure, but there was the inevitable overlap of small-town life and Nancy didn’t even know her name. There was something else there that Robin wasn’t saying, Steve could tell from her tone, but he didn’t want to pry into it. They let each other keep secrets, because it all comes out eventually. It always will.

“I need to grab something for the kids that isn’t about Indiana Jones,” Nancy says, looking exaggeratedly desperate.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about that,” Robin says, plastered-on smile stretched across her face as she heads around the counter.

Steve feels his brain fuzzing out, feels heat spreading up his neck just thinking about what he was hinting at to Robin when Nancy walked in. Like he summoned her with his thoughts. He may be sweating. He recognizes this as embarrassment, but Nancy can’t actually read his mind, even if she kind of made it seem that way back in the day. Nancy can’t read his mind, but she got pretty good at reading his face and while he doesn’t see how “I had a sex dream about your boyfriend” could possibly be written on his face, he’s just never really sure what Nancy sees. She saw right through him when they were together, saw how painfully unimportant his priorities were. Maybe now she can see how painfully inappropriate his priorities are, where his thoughts have been wandering on and off all day long.

Robin and Nancy come back, Robin practically skipping and Nancy carrying all three _Star Trek_ movies.

“I’m not sure if they’ve seen any of them,” Nancy tells him, setting the tapes down on the counter.

“Yeah, I’m not sure either, but I don’t think so,” he tells her, clearing his throat and taking her membership card when she offers it.

“I was just telling Nancy that those ones are pretty good,” Robin says. “Keith really likes them, and he likes a lot of the same things the kids do.”

“Keith sucks, though,” Steve says absently.

“Yeah, I mean, that’s fair,” Robin replies, grinning at him and leaning her elbows on the counter.

“Why are you in such a good mood?” Steve asks suspiciously.

“What ever do you mean, Steve?” Robin asks innocently. It’s incredibly suspicious. Steve puts Nancy’s movies in a bag and hands them to her. She’s also looking weirdly self-satisfied.

“You were gone like two minutes and you came back skipping, I’m just feeling a little wary of you both,” Steve says. Wary, like cautious.

“Let’s just say that you should have believed me when I told you you didn’t have to hide things from us,” Nancy says. Steve feels his face burn again from the implications of that that Nancy isn’t even aware of right now. “See ya, Robin.” She’s smiling as she turns to leave.

“What’s she talking about?” Steve asks as the door slides shut behind her.

“Steve, you will not believe what she just did.”

“What did she do?” he asks, brows furrowing.

“We were browsing the science fiction section and she was like, ‘it’s okay, you know,’ so I was like, ‘what are you talking about?’ and she nodded over to you, and you were looking extra squirrelly over there, by the way, so I absolutely can’t wait for that conversation later. But anyway, she said ‘I keep telling Steve he doesn’t have to keep it a secret,” and I was all, oh shit, what does she know? And then she goes ‘I think it’s good that the two of you got together,’ and I didn’t know what to say to that and I was still recovering from a minor heart attack because I thought she somehow figured out the other thing, so I said ‘thank you,’ and that made her so happy, you don’t even know.”

“God, how many times do I have to tell her to drop that?” Steve asks, rhetorically. Robin shrugs.

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know how to talk to her. I didn’t even tell her we’re together, she just assumed, and I was like, I mean, okay I guess? She’s really lost in it at this point,” Robin says.

“You can say that again,” Steve sighs, shaking his head. “Jeez. Ironic, really.”

“Yeah, sure.” Robin scoffs. “As if I would ever date you. I’m way out of your league.”

Steve rolls his eyes and slides his stack of returns over to her. “Go shelve these,” he says. Robin sighs and takes them, and the bell above the door rings again.

Steve is looking forward to the buzz of the rest of the day to keep his mind off of his own things, his personal dramas.

Robin spends any quiet moments reviewing her textbook, muttering phrases to herself to practice pronunciation. If she does that too much, someone’s going to start a rumor that she’s a communist, and wouldn’t that be something? It’s something else to focus on, at least.

\--

Robin loads her bike into the trunk of his car and climbs into the passenger seat.

“If it wasn’t a Thursday, I would say I’d come over and we could talk at your house, but I can’t be out late,” Robin says. “And my parents are a little suspicious of your character. Worried you’ll deflower me or something, you know how it is.”

“Yeah,” Steve replies. He puts his key in the ignition but doesn’t start the car.

“I think Keith is watching us through the window,” Robin says.

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Steve says. He sighs and starts the car, reversing and heading in the direction of Robin’s house.

“Do you want to… I don’t know, do you want to go somewhere and talk about this? I mean, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steve says, hand tightening on the wheel even as he attempts not to squeeze the stick shift.

“You’re clearly not, Steve,” Robin reasons. She’s smiling at him when he glances over, but she’s got that look in her eyes that says she’s worried about him.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Steve says.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a nightmare?” she asks. Steve laughs again.

“Categorically not a nightmare, Robin,” he says.

“Wha- oh. Oh!” Robin replies.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

“Well, why didn’t you just say that?” she laughs. “Mrs. Mulligan wouldn’t have actually hopped the counter to kill us, and you could have waited until she left if you had to.”

“Well it was more… the subject matter. You know, that caused the lack of sleep.”

“Who…?”

Steve’s throat closes up a little and he attempts to clear it. His face is heating up again.

“Well that’s where things get particularly tricky,” Steve says.

“Someone inappropriate, then. You said it was about the other thing, so it wasn’t Nancy,” Robin starts, and Steve can practically hear the gears turning in her head. “I mean, we don’t know that many people, right? So… well, is it someone that I know?”

“Like you said, we don’t know a whole lot of people, but. Yes,” Steve replies. He has to consciously loosen his grip on the wheel, fingers starting to ache a little from how tightly he’s holding on.

“Is it Keith,” Robin whisper-shouts, faux scandalized.

Steve sputters out a laugh. “No, it is not _Keith_ , Robin, jesus.”

Robin starts laughing too. “Yeah, okay, that was a silly thing to say. You were just freaking me out with how tense you were.”

“Jonathan,” Steve says, before he can talk himself out of it.

“Hm?”

“It was Jonathan. The dream.”

“Oh. Oh wow,” Robin says.

“Yeah, I know.”

“This ever happened before?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“With Jonathan, I mean,” Robin clarifies.

“Oh, yeah no, not that I remember,” Steve says, rolling his neck uncomfortably.

“One heck of a pick from your subconscious, huh?”

“My ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend? Yeah, I’d say ‘one heck of a pick’ is a good way to describe it,” Steve jokes. He pulls up outside Robin’s house and turns the car off, runs both of his hands through his hair.

“Maybe it’s just stress,” Robin suggests hopefully.

“I appreciate your optimism,” Steve tells her. He narrowly avoids sighing again and he leans his forehead against the steering wheel. “Fuck,” he says succinctly.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Robin says. Steve rolls his head so he can look at her. She’s leaning back in her seat leisurely and watching him. “So you’re pretty messed up about this, then, huh?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, sitting back up.

“Which part of it has you so frazzled?” she asks.

“Oh there are so many good parts to get frazzled over, though. I don’t know, the worst part is probably the fact that he’s with Nancy. Like, it would be one thing if it was just some guy. Mack, or Rob Lowe or something. But it _isn’t_ just some guy.”

“Steve do you… I don’t know how to ask this,” she says, and he waits while she considers it. “Do you like Jonathan?”

“Of course I do, we’re friends,” Steve says. Robin shoots him a look for avoiding the real question on purpose.

“Steve, you know what I’m asking you,” she says, not unkindly. Steve feels… he doesn’t know how to define what he feels, he just knows that it aches in his chest. He doesn’t know how to put words to that feeling he had when he saw Jonathan’s bed head on Saturday morning. How it felt to turn around and find Jonathan bashfully smiling at him from behind his camera in the park. To wake up in the middle of the night and see Jonathan’s tired eyes ghosting across his ceiling.

“I love Nancy,” he says instead. “I’m always going to love her, probably so much that it hurts.”

“Yeah, Steve, I hear first loves are like that,” Robin says, voice still gentle.

“And anyway, I can’t do this. I can’t say this out loud and like, make it real. It wouldn’t make a difference,” Steve says.

“It could,” Robin says, trying to tip her head down to make eye contact with him.

Steve laughs humorously. “It’s not… Robin, it’s alright. It’s just the stress, it’s got me confused. Anyway, we shouldn’t be worried about this, we’ve got bigger things. Like figuring out what’s going on with Hopper and El.”

“We can worry about more than one thing, Steve,” Robin says.

“We shouldn’t have to. Worry about this, I mean. It’s nothing,” Steve says. The front light flickers on and Robin’s mom steps out of the front door. “You should go.”

Robin looks at her mom and sighs. “Yeah, I should. But we are going to talk about this, Steve. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He leans over and pulls the trunk lever, hears the the door pop open. Robin gets out, pulls her bike out of the trunk, shuts it tight. She rolls her bike up the front walk and props it up on the porch by the front door. She turns around and waves at him before she heads inside and shuts the door.

Steve drives home slow and his parents aren’t there.

\--

“Where are they this weekend?” Robin asks, following Steve in.

“Who knows,” Steve says, tossing his keys into the bowl by the door and taking off his jacket. He hangs it on the coat rack and heads for the kitchen.

“I’m going to cook something, any preferences?” Steve asks. Robin practically bounces into the room.

“Omelets omelets omelets,” she chants.

“Alright, cool your horses,” Steve tells her, waving a hand in her direction. She laughs and hops up to sit on the counter. Steve smiles at her and starts grabbing ingredients out of the fridge.

“So should we talk about it?” she asks.

“No, I don’t think so,” Steve replies.

“Steve,” Robin says.

“Robin,” he replies. He starts chopping up vegetables, which serves the dual purpose of keeping him from having to look at her for this conversation.

“I think it would be better if we did, though. Talk about it,” Robin reasons.

Steve shrugs. “I remain unconvinced. You want to put some music on? You could grab a record from upstairs and put it on the player in the family room.”

“I’ll get some conversation out of you eventually,” Robin says, hopping off the counter.

“Sure,” Steve replies. He hears Robin run up the stairs, open the door of his room. He thinks about all of this, of the things that brought him here, and he doesn’t think he would change any of it, but he knows that it all scares him. Jonathan scares him and Nancy does too. He’s afraid of the way he wants them both and can’t admit it to anyone else, can hardly admit it to himself.

The truth that he has been so afraid to admit is that he doesn’t feel the acidic burn of jealousy when he sees Jonathan and Nancy together. The reality of it is much worse.

Steve almost cuts his finger when he loses focus on the pepper he’s chopping. He’s so caught up in his own head he can’t figure out what it is he should be caring about at any given moment.

The reality is that he doesn’t feel jealous of them, he feels longing.

\--

Steve has done a lot of embarrassing things in his life, which is pretty much an open secret these days, as hard as he tried to keep it all under wraps through high school. That’s why he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, with a full day between him and the dream: it’s embarrassing. He can’t talk about it. Not even with Robin.

He almost burns Robin’s omelet because he’s thinking about Jonathan, which is wildly embarrassing. Robin comes in singing along to _It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me_ and shakes him out of his reverie just in time to save the omelet. Robin takes the plate he holds out to her and jumps back up on the counter to eat the omelet. She doesn’t say anything until he is working on making his own food.

“So Steve. You dream about Jonathan often?” Robin asks, casual as anything. Steve almost burns himself in his haste to not drop the spatula.

“Excuse me?” he says, voice breaking.

“You heard me, dingus, do you do this often?” she presses.

“ _No,_ ” Steve answers, turning to her. “I already told you that.”

“Pay attention to your omelet,” she says mildly. He looks at her for one more pointed moment and then turns back to his frying pan. “If this isn’t common then what do you think inspired it?”

“Robin, seriously?” he asks, sliding his omelet onto a plate.

“Yes, seriously,” Robin says. “You told me about something that was causing you distress, so now I want to know how I can help you move past it.” She says it so reasonably, like nothing has ever made as much sense as this. It’s almost enough to make him think she’s right.

“I don’t really think that this is a conversation we should be having, Rob,” he tells her, smiling wryly.

“Why not?” she asks, shrugging. “We’re alone. You’re upset. Let’s work on it.”

“It’s… it’s inappropriate,” he tells her, leaning on the counter and digging into his omelet.

“Sure, but when has that ever stopped you?” she teases.

“Sure,” Steve says.

“So your discomfort is what, because it’s Jonathan?”

“Of course that’s what it is, Robin, jesus. What do you want me to say? It _doesn’t matter_.”

“It does matter, Steve. It does.”

“But how? Why would it matter?” he asks, putting his plate down.

“Because your feelings matter, your opinions. It matters if you feel strongly and it matters if you want it to matter.”

“But what if I don’t want it to matter?” Steve asks.

“If you genuinely feel that way then I will drop it, but I don’t think you really do and I think that we should talk about what it is you want. You know, for once.”

“Robin, I’m selfish all the time.”

“Not when it comes to your feelings, and honestly? Not really at all,” Robin says.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Steve asks.

“It means that you are shockingly emotionally literate for someone who pretends so hard not to be,” she replies.

“Robin,” he starts.

“Steve, on your remarkably heartbroken day, you still gave Nancy the go ahead to go after the guy she was pining for while you were still together,” Robin says. Steve furrows his brows.

“I don’t own her, and I didn’t have control over what she did or who she hung out with. I didn’t have to give her the go ahead to do anything,” he says, feeling defensive.

“Woah, sorry, that’s not what I meant,” Robin says, placatingly. “I just mean to say that you stepped back, you didn’t fight or push her boundaries, and like you just so clearly proved, you didn’t act like you owned her. Not a lot of guys can honestly claim they would do the same.”

“Whatever, Robin, I don’t see why it matters anyway. It isn’t relevant.”

“Well, I think it is, but sure,” Robin says.

“Can we just talk about something else? How are you doing in school?”

Robin gives him a sidelong look but moves on anyway.

“School’s okay,” she says with a shrug. “Nancy sat with me at lunch today.”

“Really?” he asks, surprised.

“Yeah, it was so weird. She didn’t really… say much, but she did ask how I was. The other band kids were so confused. She asked about you, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I told her I was coming over after school, and then asked what she was doing today.”

“So what’s she doing?” Steve asks. He finishes his omelet and sets the plate in the sink.

“It’s movie night with the kids today,” she says. “And the band kids were even more confused by that, you know, whispering to each other, whatever. She said we could come over if we wanted.”

“Did she?”

“Yeah, because I like Star Trek,” she says, looking amused.

“Where are the Wheelers?”

“Business trip, I guess. They took Holly with them too.”

“There’s a lot of that going around I guess,” Steve says.

“Yeah, guess so. They’re doing one movie a night this weekend so we can come any night I guess.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Are you going to be able to look at her this time?” she asks, almost teasing.

Steve shrugs. “Now that we’ve halfway had this aggressively embarrassing conversation, I’m not sure I can even look at you, honestly.”

“And yet here you are, still carrying on. You are so brave.”

“I know, right?” he asks. He takes her empty plate from her and starts washing the dishes.

“So let’s go, right? The kids would probably like it. I mean, except for Mike, but he doesn’t like anything.”

“I mean, that’s true. Sure, let’s go. Should we call, or?”

“Nah,” Robin says, smiling at him. “I already told her we would be there.”

Steve laughs and flicks water at her. “What would you have done if I said no?”

“I knew you would say yes, I know you too well,” she says.

“Whatever,” Steve says.

“So, Kathy pulled me aside after fifth period to ask me if you are my boyfriend.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Well I guess people have noticed you coming to pick me up from school. And Keith is being Keith about things, and he hates you, so.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Steve says, rolling his eyes.

“And then she saw this whole fiasco with Nancy so that just solidified the rumor, I guess,” Robin finishes.

“So what did you tell her?”

“I told her we aren’t dating,” Robin says. “But, if I’m honest with you, I don’t think she believed me.”

Steve sighs. “Of course not.”

“Yeah, I think I’m experiencing a popularity spike, so thank you, I guess,” she says with a laugh.

Steve finishes the dishes and dries his hands. “Yeah, you’re welcome,” he says, scowling.

_\--_

_Do we simply stare at what’s horrible and forgive it?_

_\--_

The bulk of December passes in something of a blur. Steve goes to work and hangs out with Robin and occasionally sits through awkward dinners with his parents and hosts movie night and Dungeons and Dragons and sometimes he has weird, dirty dreams about Jonathan and Nancy and stews in his guilt about it. He’s working through it.

\--

The Byers’ stay at the Wheeler’s house for Christmas break, but Jonathan and Nancy spend their days at Family Video or Steve’s house, wherever he and Robin are. Against all odds, Nancy’s determination to be friends with Robin and Steve has worked well and has spilled over into a friendship with Jonathan as well. She invites them to her birthday party and it’s weird and Mrs. Wheeler asks several overly interested questions about how Steve has been doing since the break up. Mr. Wheeler doesn’t seem to have noticed anything changed. Robin finds the whole thing terribly entertaining.

Jonathan, Nancy, Robin, and Steve spend New Year’s Eve at Steve’s house and the kids spend it in the Wheeler’s basement – it took some negotiating, but eventually they convinced the kids that it would be easier to coordinate a sleepover for them if it’s at the Wheeler’s where there are adults and guest rooms and supervision.

Steve isn’t sure what kind of magic Nancy worked with her parents to get them to approve this, but Robin told her parents she was staying at Nancy’s house and Joyce definitely knows the truth. Nancy got strangely cagey about the answer, but she probably said she was going over to Robin’s house or some other girl she knows from school.

For now they’re just sitting on Steve’s living room floor drinking beer, a bottle of champagne sitting in the fridge for midnight. They split a joint earlier and now they’re just hanging out, waiting for the countdown to start.

“What’s the plan?” Nancy asks, eyes closed, her head tipped back. She had been humming along to the song on the radio but she seems to give up on that now.

“The plan for what?” Steve asks.

“For sleeping,” she says, blinking her eyes open and sitting up straight.

“I don’t care, you two can share the guest room if you want. Or I guess you could sleep in here if you want? I don’t know, wherever people want to sleep is fine, just not in my parents’ room.”.

“Yeah, okay,” Jonathan says, nodding.

“Well where are you going to sleep?” Nancy asks. Steve shrugs.

“My room? I guess? Unless you all want to stay out here or something?”

“What about you, Robin?” Nancy asks. Jonathan looks remarkably disinterested while sipping his beer. Steve is pretty sure that Nancy hasn’t given up the idea that Steve and Robin are together regardless of what she said to him, but Jonathan doesn’t seem to care anymore.

Robin shrugs. “I go where Steve goes,” she says.

Nancy raises her brows at that, so there’s the answer Steve was looking for, he guesses.

“Oh, right, you guys have sleepovers all the time, don’t you?” Nancy asks, shooting for casual and missing by a mile, in Steve’s opinion.

“Stop fishing,” Jonathan says softly.

“It’s fine,” Robin says. “Yeah, I stay here a lot on the weekends. You want in on the slumber parties, Wheeler?”

She asks it with a straight face so maybe she’s being serious, but Steve can’t help but snort a little laughter at her words. Nancy just looks confused.

“What?” she asks.

“She’s teasing you, Nance,” Jonathan says, throwing an arm around her shoulders. Nancy’s face scrunches up.

“I just feel like we’re friends and friends don’t lie,” Nancy says.

“I mean, okay,” Robin says, laughing. “So let’s tell the truth then, right? Steve and I aren’t dating. There you go.”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “You just said you sleep in the same bed,” she says, like that settles the argument.

“Well it’s like that one time, remember,” Jonathan says, but Nancy elbows him lightly and he stops talking.

“That was different,” she says.

“Woah there, what?” Robin asks, leaning forward. Steve feels uncomfortable and unhappy.

“Nothing,” Nancy says.

“No, was Jonathan just going to prove my point about friendship and bed sharing?” Robin asks, but she’s got this steely look in her eyes like she’s catching on something and she’s getting ready to be mad about it.

“It was _different_ ,” Nancy says.

“Why?” Steve asks, immediately regretting saying it.

Nancy opens her mouth, probably to tell them how unimportant it all was again, but Jonathan speaks up before she can.

“Nothing happened, it was just that we had just gotten back from that time in the woods when we were looking for Will, remember, and she almost got stuck in the Upside Down? We were freaked out.”

Steve’s stomach sours a little because yeah, he does remember that night. And the next day, and how his split lip and black eye throbbed for days afterwards.

“Okay, so, it’s the same thing,” Robin says, gesturing widely.

“Okay but not really,” Nancy says.

“Um, yeah really, Nancy,” Robin insists. “You didn’t want to sleep alone because you were freaked out, that’s why we do it. Nightmares.”

“And you’re really not dating?” Nancy asks, looking unconvinced. Jonathan closes his eyes and tips his head back on the couch cushion again.

“No!” Robin says. “Jeez! Steve is _not_ my type.”

“Steve’s everybody’s type,” Jonathan mutters. Steve sputters a laugh, nearly choking on his beer.

“That’s an interesting premise, Jonathan, and I would love to discuss that more sometime,” Robin says. Jonathan has blinked his eyes open and is staring straight at the ceiling, looking regretful. Nancy’s staring at him with a confused expression and a bright blush on her cheeks.

“The countdown is starting,” Steve says, a little too loud, leaning over to turn the volume up on the radio.

Robin runs to the kitchen to grab the champagne and a corkscrew and hands them to Steve. The countdown gets to one and he pops the bottle and tries not to pay attention to Jonathan and Nancy kissing because he’s already got too many things racing in his head from this conversation.

“Shit,” Robin says, looking at the bottle. “I didn’t bring any cups.”

“Shit,” Steve says, laughing. “Fuck it.”

He takes a swig straight out of the bottle and passes it to Robin, who cackles and does the same. She holds the bottle out to Jonathan, and he eyes it dubiously for a second before Nancy just sighs and reaches across him to grab it.

She takes a big gulp and then pushes the bottle into Jonathan’s chest, so he takes a drink too.

“People think this is fun?” Jonathan asks, scowling.

“Well, I think people generally like the idea of having a bunch of people in a room together shouting and sweating, and the alcohol is a facilitator,” Robin says. “Right, Steve?”

“Yeah, that’s actually exactly why I went to house parties, for the sweatiness,” Steve says, laughing.

Nancy hiccups and Robin starts laughing, which gets Nancy going, and then she hiccups again in the middle of the laughing which gets Jonathan and Steve started too.

Nancy can’t stop hiccupping and Steve finally manages to settle his laughter enough to say, “I’m getting you water.” He drags himself to his feet and heads for the kitchen, grabbing some glasses and filling them with water from the tap.

“Need any help?” Jonathan asks, and Steve startles a little and turns to see him standing in the doorway.

“Sure,” he says, trying at casual. Jonathan’s leaning against the doorframe and he looks flushed and disheveled, his hair ruffled and his sweater rumpled. Steve feels his mouth go dry and swallows hard. Jonathan’s mouth tips up in the corner. He comes over and picks up two of the full glasses.

“Your cup is overflowing,” Jonathan says, and Steve realizes he’s right and rushes to turn off the tap.

“Shit,” he says, laughing. “Guess I drank too much.” He tips some of the water out of the glass and grabs a rag to dry his hand with. Jonathan mercifully does not comment on the fact that Steve has only had a beer and a half and a swig of champagne.

“Maybe you should eat something,” he says, voice soft. “I think there’s probably some pizza left.” He nods in the direction of the pizza boxes on the kitchen island.

“Yeah,” Steve says, but he doesn’t move. Jonathan’s got this twinkle in his eye that Steve kind of wants to climb inside of. Maybe he is a little messed up, somehow.

“You alive in there?” Nancy calls from the living room, punctuated with yet another hiccup.

“Yeah, Nance, we’re coming right out,” Jonathan calls over his shoulder while still looking at Steve. He lowers his voice again to ask Steve directly, “You ready?”

“Mhm,” Steve hums, grabbing the last two glasses. Jonathan looks amused and he walks away, Steve trailing behind.

“Steve has to eat something,” Jonathan announces, putting his two glasses down on the coffee table in front of where he and Nancy are sitting. Nancy had taken four coasters off the stack in the middle of the table and spread them, and Steve is reminded of all the little things about her that he used to be so incredibly crazy about.

“So why isn’t he?” Nancy asks, taking her glass of water and drinking it.

Jonathan shrugs. “Why aren’t you, Steve?”

“I,” Steve starts, and then hesitates because his answer is not one that he wants to give. “I forgot.”

“You forgot?” Nancy asks, sounding confused.

“You doing okay, dingus?” Robin asks, and Steve turns his glare to her. She’s got an elbow stretched back to rest on the couch cushion and she’s leaning her head on her hand, smirking up at him.

“I’m fine,” Steve says, sitting down.

“Sure,” Robin replies. Steve sighs and lets himself sink back into the conversation. His eyes keep sliding over to Jonathan and then he rips them away again, but it’s like he’s a magnet. Steve just can’t help it.

“Let’s play truth or dare,” Robin says, leaning across the table.

“Why?” Steve asks, pulling a face.

“I don’t get invited to parties, King Steve, I don’t get to play party games.”

“Why not,” Nancy says, shrugging. “It could be fun.”

“Yeah, alright. You in, Jon?”

“Sure,” he says.

“I’ll start!” Robin says. “Nancy, truth or dare?”

“Dare,” Nancy says.

“Hmm. I dare you… to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.”

“Wow, Rob, talk about _boring_ ,” Steve says, laughing.

“Well I haven’t played this since, like middle school! I panicked!”

“It’s alright,” Nancy says. “Starting off slow, I dig it.” She does the dare, clumsily, and then moves on to ask Jonathan. The game goes on like that for a while, the questions and dares getting more and more personal (Jonathan had his first kiss in the fifth grade with Sally Farrell, a week before she moved to Oregon, Nancy used to sneak her dad’s sports magazines into her room and she still has them hidden in a box under her bed, Robin got caught making out with a guy when her mom walked into her room and then spent a week leaving pamphlets around the house for her) and the turns getting more mixed up and erratic until Robin picks Steve, turning on him with a flushed face and a giggle.

“Alright, Steven, truth or dare?”

“Truth,” he says, because he has, perhaps, more trust than he should.

“First girl you ever slept with,” she says.

“Um,” Steve says, feeling his cheeks heat up.

“Out with it, Harrington, who was the first girl to succumb to your wiles?”

“Dare,” Steve says, glancing across the table and then looking back to Robin.

“Nope, against the rules,” Nancy says. “Come on, even I don’t know.”

Steve winces. “Well, you know. Uh.”

“Is it embarrassing or something? You’re not usually so shy,” Jonathan says.

“Nancy,” Steve says into the mouth of his beer bottle.

“What?” Nancy asks, laughing. “No I wasn’t.”

“Okay, well, I think I would know,” Steve says, not looking at them.

“Well that was not the answer I expected,” Robin says. Steve glances across the table and Jonathan looks considering while Nancy just looks like she doesn’t believe him.

“Well, there it is,” he says. “Who’s next?”

“Um,” Nancy says. “Me, it’s me.”

Steve tips the bottle back and finishes it off and the game gently slides back into safer waters, more childish questions, and Steve tries not to let his stomach tangle.

\--

When they finally start yawning and decide to go to bed, Jonathan and Nancy take the guest room and Steve and Robin take his room. As soon as the door is shut behind them, Robin turns to him and emphatically says, “Oh my _god_.”

“What?” Steve asks.

“Steve,” Robin says, laughing.

“ _What?_ ” he asks.

“What the hell was that, Steve?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Robin drops her voice a few octaves and says, “Steve is everybody’s type.”

Steve rolls his eyes and says, “Rob.”

“And then you came out of the kitchen, red as a beet! Why was your sweater wet?”

“I spilled the water!”

“How?”

“The cup overflowed.”

“Why?”

“Fine, I got distracted, okay? Are you happy?” Steve says, voice pitching up a bit.

“By what?”

“By Jonathan, jesus, stop asking me questions you know the answer to,” Steve says, purposely dropping his voice to ensure it doesn’t carry.

“Well there you go,” Robin says, spreading her hands like that means anything. She sits down heavily on the bed and Steve sighs and flops down on his back next to her. He throws an arm over his eyes.

“What did this horrendous interaction tell you that you didn’t already know, Robin?” Steve asks. He feels Robin lay down next to him.

“He was _happy about it_ , Steve,” Robin says. Steve doesn’t dignify that with a response. “What I’m trying to say is that he wanted you to look, Steve. He liked that you kept looking at him. That’s a good sign!”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Steve says, uncovering his eyes and rolling his head around to look at her.

“You’re too close to the situation, you just can’t see it,” Robin says.

“He’s dating Nancy,” Steve says.

“So?”

“ _So,_ you’re being ridiculous,” Steve says.

“Or,” Robin suggests, dragging out the sound. “You and Jonathan have a few more things in common than you thought.”

Steve doesn’t even pay that any attention. “He loves Nancy.”

“So do you,” Robin says reasonably. As if it was a reasonable thing to say.

“I hate this conversation, in case you were wondering,” Steve says.

“Yeah, that’s okay,” Robin says. “Maybe you should talk to them about it.”

“ _What?_ ” Steve says, sitting up to look down at her in shock.

“You heard me,” Robin says.

“Yeah, but it’s not making any sense.”

“I think Nancy knows,” Robin says.

“There isn’t anything for her to know,” Steve protests.

“Maybe I’ll tell them I like girls and then we can see how they react,” Nancy suggests.

“No!” Steve says.

“Why not?” Robin asks.

“Because you shouldn’t come out for _me_ ,” Steve says. Robin looks at him like he’s being extra slow on the uptake.

“I wouldn’t be doing it for _you_ , dingus. At least not fully. I’ve wanted to tell them for a while, since they want so badly to be friends, plus, we’ve got this whole ‘no secrets’ thing going on and I’d like to try holding up my end of the bargain,” Robin says. She’s got this calm face on, like she’s been thinking about it for a while.

“But what if they react badly?” Steve asks, laying back down on the bed.

“I don’t think they will,” Robin says. “But if they do, we can just play it as a joke. Like we were trying to throw them off the scent. I mean, they would probably believe it because they’re so convinced we’re trying to trick them anyway. But the thing is, when Jonathan said that thing earlier? Nancy turned red too. Like she knew what he meant and she was embarrassed that he said it out loud. I think they’ll be okay about it, Steve. And then maybe you can tell them the truth too.”

“Them being okay with it isn’t the same as them… wanting whatever it is you’re implying.”

“Well even so, even if they’re not interested in you, wouldn’t it be nice to be honest with them? There are a handful of people in the world that know what you’ve been through. They are two of only, like, 10 people you can talk to. Six of whom are children, might I add. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to talk to them about _everything_?” Robin asks, and Steve has to admit that he can see her point.

“Okay, I guess that makes sense,” Steve admits.

“Do you want to talk about the other thing?” Robin asks.

“Nothing to say about it.”

“I’m just surprised, given your reputation in school.”

“”Yeah, I don’t know what started it, but then it was just a lot of mutually beneficial omissions or embellishments or whatever that kept it going. But I really liked Nancy.” Steve shrugs. “It just kind of worked out, I guess.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell her?”

“I didn’t really know how to. She had made so many assumptions about me, and she didn’t really want to hear anything about that night anyway. It’s not like I didn’t, after, so I mean. Doesn’t matter much.”

Robin hums consideringly.

“What about you, huh?” Steve asks. “Caught making out with a _guy?_ ”

Robin groans. “I was going through a phase. It was so embarrassing, and no matter how many times I told her it would never happen again she didn’t believe me. She won’t let me have the door closed when boys come over anymore.”

Steve laughs and says, “Yeah, she’s gotta keep you in line.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, as fun as this conversation is, I’m beat. Lots of drama tonight. Let’s go to bed and we can make some decisions in the morning?” Robin asks.

“Alright,” Steve says.

Robin smiles at him. “Things are going to be good,” she says.

And weirdly? He kind of believes her.

\--

Steve’s making breakfast when Robin comes down, practically bouncing.

“So are we doing this?” she asks.

“Hmm?” Steve replies.

“Should I tell them?” Robin asks.

“Robin, I really can’t and shouldn’t make that decision for you,” he says.

“Yeah, I know. I’m totally going to tell them though,” Robin says. She looks happy about it. “New year and all that. Gotta start the year honest, right?”

“What are we being honest about?” Nancy asks, walking into the room rubbing her eyes. Jonathan is right behind her. Steve flips the stove off and slides the last piece of French toast onto a plate.

“Welcome, my friends,” Robin says.

“Someone is cheerful this morning,” Jonathan jokes. He and Nancy sit down at the kitchen table.

“I have news!” Robin says. “Well, okay, actually it isn’t news. But it is news for you two, I guess, so. News!”

Steve brings the plate of French toast over and Robin grabs syrup and butter while Nancy grabs plates and cutlery. Jonathan doesn’t know the house very well, but Steve doesn’t mind. He would never say it, but he likes seeing Jonathan sitting at his table, likes seeing Jonathan in his house. He sits down and files that away to ignore at a later date.

Everyone starts serving themselves and thanking Steve for cooking and he smiles, pleased with the praise.

“So what’s your news?” Jonathan asks.

“So I just wanted to let you know that I was serious when I told you that Steve isn’t my type. No man is,” she says, casual as anything. Steve sits completely still, trying to subtly gauge their reactions.

“That’s nice,” Jonathan says politely at the exact same time as Nancy says, “Oh!” which is… not a ringing reaction but is not as bad as he was worried it would be. Nobody has run screaming from the house, and nobody has caught on fire, and Robin is smiling and really, what else can he ask for?

“I’m saying that Tammy Thompson is a little more my type,” Robin says, clearing up any potential confusion.

“Why?” Nancy asks, nose scrunching up. “She’s so boring.”

“That’s what I said,” Steve says, letting himself relax a little.

“Actually, you said, ‘but Tammy Thompson’s a girl,’ but you can remember that however you like,” Robin says with a smile.

“Okay, sure, but then when my brain kicked back into action, I told you she was boring. I was concussed and drugged, it made me stupider than usual.”

“You’re not stupid,” Robin says.

“You’re almost always concussed,” Jonathan jokes.

“Yeah, alright,” Steve says. “Laugh it up, guys, it’s fine. It’s not a problem.”

Nancy is making her considering face, like she’s thinking about something, like the gears are really turning in her brain.

“So you’re really not dating,” she says.

“Jesus, Nancy,” Jonathan laughs.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she says, hands going up. “I just meant… well. It’s fine I guess, it doesn’t matter, I’m just. Thinking. I’m sorry I pushed it so hard, I really just thought you guys were lying.”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Steve says, shrugging. “We’ve talked about it.”

“There’s a rumor going around school about us anyway,” Robin adds. “Not that you always coming up and asking about Steve and I helped quell it.” Robin is smirking teasingly. Nancy looks bashful. Then, as a kind of aftertone, “Quell, ah. To stop it.”

“It’s all good, I think Keith likes me more now that he thinks I’m dating someone,” Steve says.

“Yeah, no, I don’t think so,” Robin says.

“Damn,” Steve mutters. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

“Yeah, well. Some things are inevitable. Unfixable,” Robin says, waving her hand dismissively.

“So. I mean, I don’t want to ask too many questions,” Nancy says.

“That’s okay, I’ll just opt out of any questions I don’t want to answer,” Robin says.

“Okay. I mean, I guess, like. When did you tell Steve?”

“Fourth of July.”

“Seriously?” Nancy asks, brows furrowed. She exchanges a look with Jonathan who looks like he has something he wants to say to Nancy and is stopping himself from saying it.

“Seriously,” Robin says.

“And… Well, I’m sorry but. Steve, that didn’t bother you?” Nancy asks. Steve looks from her to Jonathan to Robin, shocked by the question, but maybe he shouldn’t be. Was it really so obvious that he tried to ask her out? He’s not even sure now that he actually meant it and hadn’t just been projecting a need to get over Nancy onto her.

“I- Why would it bother me?” Steve asks, shifting uncomfortably. Jonathan kind of looks like he wants to disappear.

“Well, you don’t have the best track record when it comes to being accepting on that front,” Nancy replies.

“Well he was this time,” Robin says. Steve’s chest feels tight.

“I don’t… I don’t have a problem with gay people,” Steve says, but it falls flat in his own ears so he’s sure it doesn’t sound sincere to anyone else either. He looks at Robin kind of helplessly and she reaches under the table and puts a hand on his knee, squeezes without looking at him. She’s watching Nancy and Jonathan carefully.

“Robin, I’m glad you felt comfortable sharing that with us,” Jonathan says, smiling tightly. “That’s the only thing that should matter right now.”

Steve feels kind of sick but he doesn’t know how he could convey that without giving it all away.

Robin smiles at Jonathan, thanks him, squeezes Steve’s knee one more time, and whisks the conversation off in some other direction that Steve just can’t focus on. His breakfast is tasteless.

\--

Nancy and Jonathan go back to the Wheeler’s to pick up the kids to come over for a New Year’s party and Steve and Robin stay behind to get ready. Steve is still feeling a little off after the conversation that morning, that open, empty feeling he gets when he disappoints someone. Like something is missing from his chest.

“You okay?” Robin asks. Steve shrugs.

“Yeah, of course. Are you?” he asks, feeling a little like he’s just putting on a brave face.

“Yeah, Steve, I’m good. That went well for me. But for you?” she asks, screwing the top on his stash jar. He’s got a small army of his mother’s scented candles spread out throughout the room to cover what’s left of the smoke smell.

“It wasn’t about me. Obviously,” he says.

“Sure, but they accused you of being a bigot over the breakfast you made all of us, just because you didn’t hate crime me in the lady’s room at the Star Court movie theater. Like, what the hell?”

“I’ve said some things, Robin. Things I regret, you know? To Jonathan, about him. To other people,” he says.

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Robin says. “But then you’re sitting there, and we tell them that you didn’t spit in my face and they come after you like they don’t believe it.”

Steve shrugs again, follows Robin towards the stairs. “I can’t say I blame them.”

“Yeah, but I do.”

Steve sighs. They’ll all be back soon and here is the answer: Robin was wrong. They don’t want… whatever it is she was implying they wanted. He’s more disappointed than he thought he would be.

\--

“Steve, do you have parents?” Dustin asks.

“Dude!” Lucas elbows Dustin in the side.

“Ow! You asked me first!”

“Of course I have parents,” Steve says, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, well none of us have ever met them,” Dustin reasons. “And we’re here all the time. And Mike says that Nancy’s never met them either.”

Nancy’s head pops up from where she was chatting with El and Steve studiously does not make eye contact.

“Yeah, well. It’s like that sometimes. Robin’s met them, though, so she can tell you they’re real.”

“It’s true, we had dinner. They’re, uh, nice, I guess,” Robin says.

“Right, well, no need to lie, Robin,” Steve jokes. “My dad is a nightmare, but he’s never here, so. That’s fine.”

“Huh,” Dustin says. “Interesting.”

“I’m going to go grab plates,” Steve says.

“I’ll help you,” Nancy says, jumping up and following him to the kitchen.

Steve doesn’t sigh but he kind of wants to. He loves Nancy, or loved her at least, and he hates that he feels off kilter and unhappy around her right now.

He grabs some plates out of the cabinet and Nancy reaches for them. He lets her take them from him.

“I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” she says.

“It’s okay,” he replies, walking back out to the family room.

“It isn’t, though, is it?” she replies, following him. This time, he does sigh.

“I’m just going to step out for some air,” he tells no one in particular, heading to the front hall to grab his coat and then back through the family room again and out the sliding glass door.

He lets his eyes slide shut when the door opens again. He just wanted a minute.

“I’m alright, Rob,” Steve says.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Nancy replies. He opens his eyes and throws her a look over his shoulder. She looks small and cold and pretty, bundled up with her arms crossed over her chest, warmly backlit from the family room. His heart hurts. “Dustin thinks this is about him.”

“Nance, it’s okay, seriously, I’ll be right in, and you can tell him it’s not about him at all.”

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says. He plasters on a wide smile.

“What about? I know I’m an irresistible conversationalist, but there are lots of people in there.”

“I shouldn’t have said that this morning,” she says, stepping up to be right by his side. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a slightly crumpled pack of cigarettes.

“Since when do you smoke?” he asks, raising a brow as she holds one out to him. He takes it and then she reaches back into her pocket and pulls out a lighter. She lights it for him and it feels practiced. He’s missed a lot of things in the last year. He didn’t like to smoke in front of her while they were together, which put him well on his way to quitting. He guesses it was just another thing with an inevitable expiration date. He inhales deeply, holds the smoke in his lungs to feel the burn of it, punish himself for it, and then he lets it all out again.

“I don’t,” she says, finally. “Not really, at least. This is Jonathan’s coat.”

Steve looks at her again and realizes it is, he can see now that it’s a little too big at the shoulders, a little too long, and not her style. He guesses it’s probably warmer than her own, or else she just likes that it smells like him. She used to borrow Steve’s clothes because she liked that they smelled like him. Steve looks away again and tries not to think about the coat or the last day of November and how he spent it brushing his fingers against Jonathan’s and smoking the same cigarette. An image of Nancy leaning in close to light Jonathan’s cigarettes flashes unbidden through his mind. He pushes that away too.

“Right, that makes sense,” he says, staring out at the tree line.

“Are you really going to pretend forever that you aren’t upset with me?” she asks.

Steve shrugs. “Why would I be upset?” he asks.

“It was awful of me to just assume you would treat Robin poorly,” she says.

“Not like you didn’t have a good reason,” Steve says.

“You’re not the same guy,” Nancy replies, fiddling with the lighter in her hand.

“Sure I am,” he says. “Self-obsessed, air-headed, materialistic.”

“You aren’t any of those things,” she says, and out of the corner of his eye he can see her face looks pinched. He shrugs again but doesn’t say anything.

“In any case,” she continues. “None of those things excuse how I reacted this morning. I shouldn’t have made it about you.”

“Did you…” Steve trails off, shaking his head. He takes another drag of the cigarette just for something to do, to keep himself from saying something he’ll regret.

“Did I what?” she asks, shoving her hands in her pockets. Jonathan’s pockets. Something about it makes him feel bolder, maybe a little angrier.

“Did you feel like this when we were together?” he asks. “Did you think that I was some really shitty guy? Why were you even with me?”

“I don’t,” Nancy says, sounding confused. “I don’t know what to say.”

Steve chuckles humorlessly. “I feel like that’s the answer then,” he says. “God, were you just waiting for a reason to break up with me? Why did you wait so long?”

“Steve, I dated you because I liked you,” she says.

“Sure.” He finishes his cigarette and drops it on the patio. He steps it out and shoves his hands in his pockets. They’re like ice.

Nancy sighs. “I liked spending time with you. But I guess maybe it was just… it was safe to stay with you,” she says.

“Safe?” he asks.

“I knew what you were like, what it was like to be with you. And with Jonathan it was… it was different. Harder. He wasn’t ready and I wasn’t either.”

Steve nods. “Cool.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Nancy says.

“I’m fine, Nance, it’s cool. I get it,” Steve says. He never really expected to be the one that Nancy picked. He hoped, sure, but he wasn’t really expecting it. She’s so smart and she wanted more than Steve was ever going to be able to give her working for his dad. She’s going to get out of Hawkins and become some famous reporter and he’s going to be here, taking over his father’s company whether he deserves it or not. Wants it or not.

“I don’t really think you do,” she says softly.

“It’s weird, don’t you think?” Steve asks, changing the subject again. “Being here, I mean.”

“I’ve been to your house plenty of times, Steve. We’re friends, right?”

“Sure,” Steve says. “But I mean out here. Like, it’s so fucked up that we’re just… out here. Smoking, talking, and she isn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Nancy says. “Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted,” Steve says. “Jonathan could do that. I get it.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nancy says.

“You didn’t think that way a year ago,” Steve says, smiling wryly.

“It was a different time,” she says.

“Still. That kind of anger? It’s not the kind of thing you can build a relationship on. It was never going to last, was it?”

“Steve, I…” she starts, and then trails off. He looks over at her and she looks lost. The back door opens again.

“Steve! Can Max and I go get a record from your room?” Dustin calls.

“Break something and it’s over for you, gremlin,” Steve shouts back.

“Whatever, Steve,” Max calls. The door slides shut again.

“We should probably head back in,” Steve says.

“Listen, Steve,” Nancy says, reaching out and grabbing his arm before he can turn away from her. “I care about you. I don’t think you’re a bad person, I just. I didn’t know what I wanted. I still don’t.”

“Well I can’t wait for you to figure it out, Nance. It’s not fair to me or you, and it’s not fair to Jonathan. You can’t just say stuff like that to me behind his back,” Steve says. His stomach sinks thinking about whether or not she ever had a conversation like this with Jonathan. Part of him doubts it because he thinks Jonathan is too honest not to have told him, but he thinks he would have deserved it if they did talk like this and kept it a secret. He’s got all of this guilt about the person he used to be and the person he still is underneath it all.

“It’s not-” she starts. She sighs. “Yeah, I know, Steve. I’m sorry.”

Steve shivers hard, and he can see Nancy shaking out of the corner of his eye, can feel her hand trembling on his arm. He wants to wrap her up in his arms, he aches with how much he misses her, but he just turns away from her, letting her hand fall off of him, and heads for the door.

When he walks in, Jonathan looks up to meet his eyes and smiles.

Steve feels like he’s drowning in how much he wants.

\--

Jonathan corners him in the hallway before they leave. He’s got a hand on Steve’s elbow and his hand is warm.

“I’m sorry about what Nancy said earlier,” he says, soft. He’s standing so close to Steve.

“She already apologized, not that she really had to. It’s fine,” Steve says, feeling his face warm up.

“She just. She’s defensive, you know that. She was feeling… I don’t know, she just wanted to cover her bases, I guess. Test the waters.”

“Test the waters for what?” Steve asks, furrowing his brows. Jonathan shrugs.

“We’re sorry about it either way,” Jonathan says.

“Did you tell her to apologize?” Steve asks, some pieces snapping into place. He finds that he’s surprised.

Jonathan shrugs. “It was the right thing to do, she would have done it either way,” he says, shoulders hunching.

“Thanks, man,” Steve says. Jonathan smiles, one that feels private somehow. Steve smiles back.

Jonathan leaves almost as quickly as he appeared, and then Steve is alone. Even Robin had to go home tonight. His house feels big and empty and it echoes as he walks around.

Steve is worried about the nightmares he might have, but he doesn’t know what to do about them. He puts a record on and falls asleep with the lights on.

_\--_

_which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it._

_\--_

Steve comes home from work on Valentine’s day to find his parents' car in the driveway. He spent his whole day selling overpriced candy to couples renting rom coms at the last minute, so nothing is phasing him anymore. He left Robin to deal with the desperate guys trying to rent _Splash_ or whatever.

Steve comes home from work on Valentine’s day to find his parents' car in the driveway. He spent his whole day selling overpriced candy to couples renting rom coms at the last minute, so nothing is phasing him anymore. He left Robin to deal with the desperate guys trying to rent _Splash_ or whatever.

As he shuts the front door behind himself, he hears his mom's voice call out, “Steve, honey? Is that you?”

“Yeah, I’m home,” he calls back, kicking off his sneakers and toeing them into a presentable-ish state. He heads back to the kitchen and finds her standing by the stove.

“Hey, Ma,” he says, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. She smiles but she doesn’t really look at him.

“A package came for you today,” she tells him, gesturing vaguely behind her. “It’s right over there on the counter. Is that really from the Byers boy?”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up, surprised. Will has never sent him mail before, and Steve can’t think why he would. He doesn’t have to figure it out, though, because it isn’t from Will. The package is addressed in a familiar slanting print, all uppercase, and the return address says _JONATHAN BYERS._

“Uh,” he says. “Yeah, it is.”

“I didn’t realize you were friends. Did they move? The address isn’t from around here.”

“Yeah, Ma, they moved at the end of the summer. Guess the fire freaked them out or something.”

His mom hums noncommittally. “Well, dinner is in an hour. Your father is in his study, try not to make too much noise, okay?”

“Sure,” Steve says, running his thumbs over the writing. He heads up to his room and grabs the phone.

Someone picks up on the third ring.

“Byers household, how can I help you?” Joyce says. She sounds tired.

“Hey, Mrs. Byers, it’s Steve.”

“Oh, hey, honey. Don’t I keep telling you to call me Joyce?”

Steve smiles to himself. “Right, sorry, Joyce.”

“Are you alright, Steve?”

Steve has always loved the way she says his name over and over in conversation, like she’s making sure he knows she’s really paying attention, or like she’s reminding him who he is or something. It’s one of those weird things he can’t help but love about her.

“Everything’s fine, thank you, I was just wondering if Jonathan was around?”

“Oh! Well, he actually is, hold on, I’ll grab him. You have a good day, alright, honey?”

“You too, Joyce, thank you,” Steve says, and he waits while she goes away. He taps his fingers against his thigh and tries to remember when he is supposed to start hearing back from the schools he applied to, just for something to distract himself. It works so well, Jonathan’s concerned voice almost startles him.

“Steve? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, man, all good. I was just calling because, well, I just got a package from you? Just wanted to make sure you meant to send it to me.”

“Of course I did,” Jonathan says, and Steve can practically hear the smile in his voice. It’s the confused one. “How would I have messed that up?”

“I don’t know, you’ve never sent me anything before, though!”

“Well, did you open it?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, open it then!”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Steve says, tucking the phone between his ear and his shoulder and then opening the package.

He slides a cassette tape out and flips it over in his hands a few times before reading the tiny, slanted, writing on the label sticker. The title is _STEVE HARRINGTON’S EDUCATION MIXTAPE_ , which makes Steve laugh.

“What is this, dude?”

“It’s a tape,” Jonathan says, and Steve rolls his eyes. “Do you like it?”

“I can see that it’s a tape, did you make this?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“For educational purposes, obviously. You can’t just exclusively listen to pop music, man, you have to broaden your horizons.”

Steve stamps down on that warm feeling spreading through his chest.

“Oh,” he says, instead of any of the half formed thoughts cluttering hsi brain. “Thanks, um. I’ll make you one, too. Broaden your horizons.”

Jonathan laughs. “I would like that.”

“You would?” Steve asks before he can stop himself.

“Yeah, that would be cool. Thanks.”

“Cool,” Steve says, smiling widely.

“Well, I’ll let you go so you can listen to that,” Jonathan says.

“Right, yeah, will do. Tell the kids I said hi, okay?”

“You got it, Steve. Talk to you soon.”

“Bye.”

Steve hangs up the phone and flops back on his bed, throwing an arm over his eyes and trying not to be overcome with that giddy rush he got the first time Nancy gave him the time of day. He fails.

He briefly uncovers his eyes to look at the tape again, but then he just thinks about Jonathan kneeling in front of his stereo or record player or whatever and painstakingly recording it, having to start over when someone talks, pictures him leaning over it and neatly writing down every song on either side, writing Steve’s own name in his steady hand and he has to look away again.

It almost makes up for having to sit through a tense dinner with his parents, who thought it would be nice to spend Valentine’s Day with their son this year, for some ill advised reason. Steve thinks it was probably his mom’s idea, but he doesn’t want to ask.

Later, when he listens to the tape, he smiles the whole time.

\--

Jonathan starts calling on weekends, just to catch up, and Nancy starts eating lunch with Robin once a week. Eventually, it starts feeling like they actually believe he’s different now. Eventually, Steve stops getting that sick twist in his gut when he talks to them, and it starts to feel like they could really be friends.

Steve has severely mixed feelings about this, because the more he gets to know Jonathan the more he likes him, and the more he hears Jonathan and Nancy talk about each other the more he wishes he could be a part of it.

Steve and Jonathan continue sending tapes back and forth, sometimes including notes explaining the song choices, and something about it feels so private.

The kids keep asking where he’s getting the tapes from, because he supposedly has “good music taste now,” which, rude. He’s always had good music taste.

\--

March is spent brainstorming ways to investigate the Hopper mystery. Brainstorming is perhaps a strong word for it, but either way, it’s all done to the soundtrack of Jonathan’s favorite songs, which Robin finds incredibly amusing. She sings along to Bruce Springsteen (a surprising addition, she says) and The Who (not so surprising) while reading through those map books she gets from the library. Mostly, Steve just watches and grabs whatever she asks for.

Robin comes up with a plan to use Dustin’s nerd camp radio to see if there is anything helpful on the frequency from the mall, which seems like a long shot, but Steve’s willing to try it because it’s the best lead they’ve got. They don’t tell anyone what they plan to do, because they don’t want to drag it all back up again.

They wait for Dustin to set it up on his own so he won’t ask any questions, and it’s April before they’re able to make any progress. 

\--

As it turns out, Russia has… just, so many time zones. So many. Steve had never really thought about it before because it didn't really affect him in any way. Now that he has been laying out on a blanket listening to static on Dustin's big radio thing with Robin for a few hours in the middle of the night, it matters a lot more. She's tracing out made up constellations in the sky. It's not quite cold but Steve's got his hands shoved in his pockets.

"This is dumb," Steve says, not for the first time. He can practically feel Robin's eye roll.

"We have no other leads, Steve."

"Yeah, I know, it just feels like such a long shot."

As if on cue, the static breaks and they both freeze. At first, it's hard to tell what's happening, but the volume picks up, the sound stabilizes, and Robin scrambles for the tape recorder.

When the adrenaline settles, they realize that the transmission they were so excited about is just some late night radio host coming through on the channel. Maybe the wind moved the antenna or something. Steve groans and drops backwards onto the grass.

"This is hopeless. We're teenagers. We don't have any way of doing anything even if this had worked," he says. Robin turns the radio off and crawls across the grass to curl up at his side.

"I just wanted something good to happen for once," she says. "Not that this would be… good. I just wanted to be able to fix something that is broken for once."

"Yeah," Steve sighs. "Yeah I wanted something good too."

“Steve?” Robin whispers a few moments later.

“Yeah?”

“We’re going to get out of here, right?”

She sounds small and sad and Steve wraps his arm around her shoulders.

“Of course,” he says. She won’t look at him, but she nods.

“I just think there’s too much sadness here. This town kills people if they stay, even if they’re still breathing.”

Steve’s heart clenches, thinking of his parents and Nancy’s and Robin’s, who are just so unhappy and unwilling to admit it.

“Yeah,” he says. “It does.”

He stares up at the sky, tries to remember the constellations that Robin pointed out, and thinks about the future.

Eventually, when Robin starts to shiver all over, he drives them home and imagines he’s driving out past the welcome sign and never looking back.

\--

Steve takes Robin to her senior prom. The year is almost over and they are going to take off at the end of the summer, so they kind of just decided to throw caution to the wind when it came to whether or not people thought they were dating. Not that either of them did much (read: anything at all) to quell the rumors to begin with. Hawkins was in for a shock if they ever decided to come back and be honest about themselves, but for now, they were willing to play the game.

Robin looks amazing when he shows up to her house to pick her up. Steve knows that her mom insisted on doing her hair and makeup, but Robin picked her own dress. It’s this deep, emerald green color and it falls just below her knees. It has this really flattering off the shoulder cut and the freckles on her shoulders really stand out. They take a whole bunch of awkward photos in her family’s living room, right in front of the fireplace. They survive the posturing from her father, who is concerned for her honor or something, without laughing; the cheek pinching from her mother, who is looking suspiciously teary and trying to hide it; and the relentless teasing from her siblings, who don’t understand how she went from “a total loser” to going to prom with anyone, “let alone someone cool,” as they so kindly put it. When they are finally allowed to leave, Robin practically runs to Steve’s car, letting out a relieved groan once they are safely inside.

“I am so sorry,” she says, laughing. Steve smiles.

“No, they’re sweet. I did _not_ get that for my prom. My dad wasn’t even there and I don’t have any siblings unless you count the kids but they weren’t there either, so it was like. Not that much excitement.”

“Who did you go with?” Robin asks. Steve shrugs.

“I mean, I had already made plans with Nancy when everything happened, like I think she and her mom were already looking for dresses, you know? So it was kind of weird, after, when I didn’t have a date all of a sudden, but I mean. I didn’t have to look super hard to find someone else to go with, but it wasn’t like I was excited to go with somebody else. It ended up being Brenda Carrow,” he says.

“Oh,” Robin says, furrowing her brows. “I cannot picture that.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, I get that. I have pictures, obviously, that my mom took of us. You can see them next time you come over if you’d like,” he says.

“Oh, hell yeah,” Robin laughs.

“You look amazing, by the way,” Steve says.

“Why thank you, sir,” she says, tipping her head at him. “You do as well.”

“Thanks, I love wearing a tux.”

Robin rolls her eyes and mutters, “of course you do,” and Steve smiles. He loves a good do-over.

\--

Jonathan managed to come down for prom. Nancy isn’t going to go over for his because they don’t really know many people and they don’t see the point in going to two, but they meet up with Steve and Robin outside the school. Jonathan looks uncomfortable and twitchy yet somehow still charming in his suit and Nancy looks stunning in sky blue and the sun is setting at just the right angle to shine off of her hair. Steve smiles and waves at them from across the parking lot.

“Careful,” Robin whispers, tucking an arm through his. “Don’t want anyone thinking you’re more interested in your friends than you are in your date.”

Steve laughs brightly and rolls his eyes, knocking into her while they walk. There are a few groups lingering outside, cutting looks at them as they get closer to the doors. A couple of girls are giggling a few feet away from Nancy and Jonathan.

Once they make it over to them, Robin reels them all into a four-person hug, uncharacteristically excited.

“We all look amazing,” she says, jumping back from them again. “I never really pictured myself being excited about prom, but I’m pretty excited now.”

“Same here,” Jonathan replies, shoving his hands in his pockets. Nancy smiles at him, small and private.

“Let’s get in there, then,” Steve says, pulling on Robin’s arm.

The whole night is fun, getting to dance and laugh with Robin and Jonathan and Nancy and sometimes their friends that come wandering over. Steve hadn’t met many of Robin’s friends, but it seems like as good a time as any to meet them when they’re all dancing and care too much about their own prom night dramas to ask too many questions about their friendship. Steve gets stopped once at the refreshments table by some girl he vaguely remembers (Linda? Maybe?) who asks if he and Robin are here together, with a dubious quirk to her brow. He simply tells her yes and then leaves, not caring how it goes over.

Steve catches Robin staring wistfully at Tammy from across the room when he comes back and he leans in close to her ear to whisper her name in his Kermit voice and she laughs and bats at his arm and doesn’t look back at Tammy again for the rest of the night. Steve counts it as a win as he pulls her up to dance to _How Will I Know_ , spinning her around until she’s practically falling over into him and laughing so hard she clutches her stomach.

After the dance is over, they all head to a diner because they don’t want the night to end and eventually just decide to head back to Steve’s for the night since his parents are away for Memorial Day weekend. They end up sleeping sprawled out across the living room in borrowed clothes and Steve falls asleep laughing and wakes up warm.

\--

For Robin and Nancy’s graduation, there’s a small village of staked out seats for the Wheeler’s, the Byers’s, Steve, and the kids. Even Erica came. Steve kind of loves it, being so surrounded by people, even if Mrs. Wheeler still hasn’t really gotten over the fact that Steve and Nancy are friends again. She seems to think it’s weird.

He doesn’t mind it, not when Joyce has accepted him into their lives with wide open arms and endless doting over his well being.

When Robin’s name gets called, their group explodes with cheers, Dustin jumping out of his seat to clap. Erica reaches across Lucas to tug Dustin back down by his sleeve and he cackles wildly as he collapses back into his seat. The excitement explodes back out of them when Nancy walks across the stage and then, all too quickly, it’s over.

After the ceremony, Steve goes hunting through the crowd for Robin and when she spots him over her dad's shoulder, she practically launches herself into his arms, chanting “I’m done,” over and over in his ear. He knows how much she’s been itching to get out of this place, long before Steve ever was, long before the monsters. He spins her around and congratulates her and puts her back down so all of her other admirers can congratulate her too.

He finds his heart is swelling up with pride and he turns around to see Nancy and Jonathan and their parents coming over and he’s so proud of them too. The Byers clan is leaving again tonight, but they’re here just long enough to attend the celebratory party the Wheeler’s are throwing for a few hours.

A week later, they do it all again for Jonathan’s graduation and it’s just as exciting.

_\--_

_Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued._

_\--_

To celebrate Robin’s graduation, she and Steve drive out to Indianapolis to see a movie. The nice thing about going out to Indianapolis is that it feels like it’s a world away from Hawkins when you need it to. That’s what carries Steve through this trip, what quells his nerves to something manageable, what makes him capable of existing alongside Robin’s jumpiness, the nerves bundled up just under skin and waiting to burst out.

There’s some small-time theater playing this small-time documentary for a few days and Robin suggested they go see it, and Steve was surprised to find that he was really interested in going to see a documentary. The subject matter just made him feel a little twitchy, is all.

The thing is, he doesn’t even know how she found out about this. When he asked her about it she shrugged vaguely and said “I hear lots of things, Steve,” in a way that felt almost ominous. He supposes she probably saw it in a copy of the Indy Star or maybe her dad saw it and complained about it or maybe she just heard whispers about it on the street – not as likely, considering the way that Hawkins is, but Sunday gossip can be unpredictable.

He’s excited, and he wants to be here, and he feels just far enough away that he thinks it’s safe for him to feel that way.

He told the kids he and Robin were going out to the city, but he didn’t tell them why even when they pressed. Maybe they thought it was a date. Lucas certainly winked enough times to indicate that he thought so.

When they arrive at the theater, they have to circle back because he misses the parking lot. He doesn’t think he can be held accountable for it: the marquee reads _BEFORE STONEWALL_ in big, bold letters and his heart started racing, so he couldn’t focus. Again, he can’t be held accountable for that. That’s not the kind of thing that would ever play at The Hawk. Robin, mercifully, didn’t make fun of him for that, she just kept on telling him about band practice at top speed. Her words are almost running together, which is how Steve can tell how nervous she really is. Or excited. Or, he supposes, both at once.

When he finally gets himself together enough that he effectively parks his car, he turns the engine off and pulls the key out and then just… sits there, hands on his thighs.

“You okay?” Robin asks. Steve looks in her direction with a smile.

“Yeah, you?” he asks.

“I’m nervous,” she admits, glancing around the parking lot like she expects Mr. Sharp from Huckleberry Street to pop up from behind a beige sedan.

“Yeah, me too. Do you still want to go?”

“Yes!” Robin says, enthusiastic. “I’m just nervous.”

“I think this is the only documentary I’ve ever been kind of excited for,” Steve says. Robin laughs.

“Yeah, okay, so you know how you asked me why Keith doesn’t like you?”

“He doesn’t like me because I have better hair than him, not because I don’t like documentaries,” Steve tells her, laughing.

“The documentary thing certainly doesn’t help your case. He thinks you live under a rock. Like, he doesn’t understand how you haven’t seen _any_ movies. Even the popular ones,” Robin says.

“I’m busy going on _dates_ , Keith,” Steve says.

“Yeah, not even,” Robin teases. “More like you’re busy chauffeuring preteens around and watching Indiana Jones for the seventy-third time.”

“Or maybe I’m just too busy hanging out with you, none of the ladies know I’m available,” Steve counters. “And now this! I’m finally seeing a movie and I can’t even tell Keith about it. Life is a rip-off.”

“Let’s just go inside, dingus,” Robin says, unbuckling herself. Steve feels far more settled now than he did before.

They’re still laughing when they get to the door and Steve holds it open for her. There are two people at the desk and they both look up when Steve and Robin walk in. There’s only one movie playing here because there’s only one projection room, but Robin still asks for the tickets by name anyway, her voice almost sounding defiant when she says it, proud. The girl behind the counter smiles widely and says, “sure thing, honey,” and rips two tickets in half, those red raffle tickets like they have at the fair. Robin also asks for popcorn and no drinks because she stashed two cokes in her backpack before they left Hawkins.

Steve pays the checkout girl and sticks the ticket in his wallet. His heart is racing like a hummingbird’s.

“The theater is just down this hallway on the right,” the girl says, gesturing to her left. Steve’s eyes drop to her nametag. It says LISA in bolded letters.

“Thank you,” Robin says, taking the popcorn the guy offers over. She knocks her elbow with Steve’s.

“Enjoy the show,” the guy says. Steve looks at him and smiles politely and the guy winks. Steve is pretty sure his face turns beet red.

“Thanks,” he says. Later, he may be willing to admit to running away, but only under duress. He follows Robin into the theater, and they take two seats in the back. There aren’t that many people in the theater, but it feels like the room is electrified. Steve figures maybe he’s just being dramatic, but he’s never done something like this before, never been somewhere where he could be told that it’s okay to like boys.

“Did that guy out there wink at you?” Robin asks, voice hushed and conspiratorial (conspiratorial: secretive), passing him the popcorn and reaching into her bag. Steve feels his whole body flush.

“He could have been winking at you,” he says. “Or he could have had something in his eye.”

Robin laughs, but it isn’t mean, it’s maybe a little delighted. “He totally winked at you,” she says, producing the cokes from her bag. “I hate when you act like you’re not hot,” she teases.

“You’re the worst,” he says, laughing. The lights dim and Steve feels himself tense up in anticipation. Robin inhales sharply next to him.

The movie starts and he’s hooked from the first frame.

\--

There's this one part of the documentary, an old TV interview, and there’s this guy talking about being gay. Right there on the screen is this guy who wasn't much older than Steve and he was on TV talking about liking men. Steve knows that that's the whole point, but it's still kind of blowing his mind to see a guy this young and this honest from some local news report in the Fifties. It kind of throws Steve's whole thing into a different light, if he's honest.

This guy knows the risks and he knows what he's doing and he's doing it by choice. He says it himself: if being honest can help someone else he feels like he has to do it. Something catches fire in Steve at that. His breathing catches, he can hear it so he knows Robin can too. She reaches over and silently drops a hand on his knee and squeezes and when he looks at her, she's smiling wide. His heart fills up.

It's like this: if this guy, Curtis or whoever he is in real life, could do this huge thing, what was stopping him? His dad? Hawkins? The fear of disappointing or disgusting Nancy? He doesn't want these things if he can't have them for real. That's the problem. He wants all of it on his own terms, and maybe that makes him selfish, but he almost doesn't even care. He just wants. And if he could help someone in the process? Well, he thinks he would do nearly anything to make the kids feel normal and cared for and accepted in a way he never got to feel. He's heard them talking, he's heard their suspicions and he knows they want to make sure Will knows they don't mind it. He wants Will and all the rest of them to know he feels the same.

By time the credits roll, he's feeling fired up and resolved and inspired. There was so much awful in the documentary and there is so much awful now in real life and on the news, but if he could, for once, help reduce some of that awful? Well, that would be everything, wouldn't it?

The guy behind the desk winks at them again as they leave and Steve is red faced and giddy by time they get to the car, both from the experience and from Robin's playful ribbing (which included some actual rib nudging from her elbow).

"So what did you think?" she asks, practically bouncing in her seat. He looks at her with a wide smile.

"I think I'm gonna do it," he says.

"Do what, make a documentary?" she teases.

"Tell them. The kids, Nancy. Jonathan."

Her eyes get wide and she says, "Tell them..."

"Oh!" he says, waving a hand in the air. "No, not that much. But that I... That I like guys. I think I want to do that."

Robin's face slides from concern to excitement, her smile wide. "That's so exciting!"

"Yeah," Steve says, kind of buzzing with excitement and nerves. He nods his head a few too many times.

"I'll be there with you when you do it," she says. "You know, for moral support and whatever. Just let me know when you want to."

"Thanks, Rob," he says. "And with the kids, I won't ever tell them anything you don't want them to know." He says this earnestly, a serious look on his face.

"Well if you do it, maybe I will too," she says lightly. He looks at her again, brows raised. "I'm not going to steal your moment, of course," she continues, smiling.

"You better not," he says.

"Wouldn't dream of it," she reassures him. "But after they have a reasonable amount of time to process, I'll drop that on them and then we'll all be on the same page."

"God, they're gonna lose it," Steve says, shaking his head. Robin snorts.

"What inspired you to do this, anyway? Anything in particular or just the existence of Indianapolis?" she asks.

"Well it's like that one guy said, you know? If him being honest about who he was could help even one person then it would be worth it. So if I could help those kids? That would be worth all of," he says. "Even how nerve wracking it's going to be to say it out loud to someone else, you know?"

"Yeah," Robin says, nodding. "Yeah it's really freaky to tell people."

Steve shoots her a crooked half smile. "Well, in case I haven't said it lately: thank you for telling me. For trusting me with that or whatever. And staying friends with me after everything went to shit."

Robin shrugs. "What can I say? I'm a giver. Thanks for driving me around and only giving me one mild car accident concussion."

"I do what I can," Steve says. He pulls out carefully onto the street.

Robin's smile cools off a little and she gets quiet. Steve glances at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Hey," she says, sounding tentative (tentative: unsure, hesitant). "Can I show you something?"

"Sure," Steve says, brows furrowing. "What's up?"

"You should take a right at the next light," she says, looking like she's trying hard not to seem overly interested.

"Yeah, alright," he says, and flips his blinker on.

She ends up directing him to this little bookstore a block away from the theater.

Robin leads him to the back of the store. She crouches down in what seems to be a highly neglected corner. There is one tiny shelf with a sticker label that reads "Homosexuality." There are maybe 15 books on the shelf. Robin sits cross legged in front of it and purses her lips. Steve waits her out.

"I used to take the train here on weekends sometimes. I'd walk around the city and just… get out of Hawkins for a little while." She glances up at him and smiles kind of sadly. "You know how it can be. Anyway, I found this place. I don't know, I was just sort of, well, drawn to it, I guess.

"So we met here, kind of," she goes on, voice soft. Steve doesn't ask who or any other questions, he just sits down and watches her face. "I mean, we had been in class together forever, so we knew of each other, but she saw me here and she spoke to me for probably the first time.

"Turns out we shared a common interest in coming back here and reading the books they had to offer. It's far enough away from Hawkins that the odds of bumping into anyone we knew would be slim, but there we were. Both of us, going through the same thing." She turns her head to look at the bookshelf. She reaches out and runs her finger along the spines.

"We started meeting up every Saturday. It was like this unspoken thing. Sometimes, she would hold my hand. Nobody ever comes back here, really, so it was like a private thing, you know? Just for us. She came by my house a few times, right before it happened. We would… hang out. I've got this hideous argyle sweater hanging in the back of my closet because I never got to return it to her. She went missing just a few days later."

Steve's heart sinks as quick as a stone thrown into the quarry. Robin swallows hard and looks up to make eye contact, her eyes watery.

"Nancy didn't even know who I was, Steve," she says, voice cracking. "I didn't get to tell anyone. Nobody even knew we knew each other."

"Rob," Steve says, unsure of what to do now.

"Anyway," she says, swiping at her eyes. "That's the secret. I know you've been wondering. I only ever told one other person and she died. It felt like… like we were both being punished for it, you know? I think it was worse to find out how she really died, but I knew she wouldn't have just run off. Not without telling me. She would have left me some kind of sign. When the articles came out, I just believed them. And then you…" She shakes her head.

Steve's hands ball up in his lap, palms sweating. His throat has gone completely dry.

"I haven't come back since the day of her funeral. I couldn't go, so I came here instead. This one was her favorite," she says, reaching out and pulling a book off the shelf. It's called _Gay American History_ , one of the titles that didn't make him want to blush from the tips of his ears all the way down. "She used to talk about how history has been revised. Hm. Changed. To make it seem like certain people never existed or that certain people should have had power over others. She liked this one because it was... a step in the right direction, I guess. Filling in some gaps. It was someone coming in and saying ‘we were here. we always have been.’

"I thought about coming back and buying it. After, you know. I had all these dreams of things I could do or gestures I could make. Leaving it for her. But I couldn't do that to her, it wouldn't be fair. And if I kept it, and my parents found it?" She turns the book over in her hands a few times, runs her thumbs over the cover. "So I didn't do anything."

Steve doesn't know what to say. His heart sits heavy in his chest, a reminder of the things he did wrong and how he didn't save her. It was harder, after they knew the truth, not to blame himself. It was hard to watch Nancy's guilt blossom behind her eyes like every time she touched him she was reminded of that night. He used to wonder why Barb hadn't just left, but he knew why. She was worried. Nancy was right, they had left her. It should have been fine. They should have been able to just be dumb teenagers. But she waited for Nancy and she died because of it. Because of monsters in the dark and his stupid pool and some stupid game.

He can't go back in time, so he reaches out and takes Robin's hand. She smiles at him, but it looks sad. Her whole body is sad.

“I just didn’t want to hold onto it anymore, it was breaking me up inside,” she says. He squeezes her hand and pulls her into his side and they soak in the day.

He buys her the book on his way out and tells her she can keep it at his house until the leave because his parents won’t look. He can’t make it stop hurting, but he can give her something to take with her, something to prove it was real. Something that says, “we were here, and you can’t erase us.”

\--

The day Steve picked sneaks up on him. Steve and Robin agreed to do it, to tell them now, while they're all in one place, just a week after their trip to Indianapolis. Jonathan and Joyce managed to get the same four days off of work right at the end of June for a not-Fourth-of-July celebration and Steve is pretty sure Will and El have been secretly plotting a way to get left behind when they have to go back since, like, March.

Steve's got his heart racing again. This can’t be healthy. Robin's sitting cross legged on the couch next to him and the kids are crowded around the coffee table arguing over rolls or something. 

Steve can't focus on anything right now, his brain flitting from topic to topic, unable to settle.

"Steve!" Dustin says, like he's said it a few times. As he's saying it, Robin nudges at him a little to bring him back and he almost jumps.

"Yeah! Yeah, what?" he says, acting like he hadn't totally spaced out.

"I _said_ ," Mike replies, sounding indignant as ever. "Can you please do the jail guards voice."

"Oh," Steve says. He runs a hand through his hair. "Sure. What are my lines?"

Mike rolls his eyes and hands over his folder. Steve delivers the lines in the same gravelly voice that he always uses for the jail guards, a vague impression of Hopper’s cop voice that stirs up some strange sense of nostalgia for busted parties. Somehow, even though these kids can get really intense about a lot of things, they don't seem to mind that guards all sound the same as each other or the apothecators all sounding the same as each other or whatever. Robin's got this look on her face, she's watching him with furrowed brows. He finishes reading and smiles, handing the folder back to Mike.

"Hey, what's wrong with you, dude?" Lucas asks.

"Nothing," Steve replies. "What's wrong with you?"

Lucas rolls his eyes now, too, and they go back to the game. Will, though. He's still eyeing Steve like he's got something to say. Steve smiles at him and nods towards the game. Will twists his lips up in something like a smile and turns back to the table.

Robin nudges him again and he turns back to her with a hum.

"You okay?" she asks, softly so as not to call the kids attention back to them. Steve shrugs.

"Yeah, I'm okay, just," Steve pauses, turns it all over in his head. "Nervous."

Robin nods. "Yeah, I get that. I thought I might throw up again when I told you."

Steve smiles.

"Stop whispering, weirdos," Dustin tells them.

"Mind your business, dingus," Robin says.

"You guys are acting weird," Max says, shifting nervously. "Seriously, what's going on?"

Steve inhales and holds it for a few seconds as all the kids turn on them. He has fought literal monsters, he can do this.

"Nothing," Robin says.

"Okay, obviously something is up, though," Lucas presses.

"Who cares?" Mike says.

"Why do you act like you hate them?" El asks, shifting around to get more comfortable. Mike shoots her one of the most betrayed looks Steve has ever seen from him, which is saying a lot considering Mike's entire personality. Robin just looks at Steve, like she's trying to gauge his response. Steve panics.

"I wanted to tell you all that I like guys," he says, all in a rush. Six pairs of wide eyes blink up at him and Robin's feet hit the ground.

"Um," Dustin says. "What?"

Steve runs a hand through his hair and nods, swallowing hard. "So, there it is," he says.

“There _what_ is, dude, that was so vague,” Dustin mutters, rolling his eyes, and Steve would laugh if it was just them but he’s got five other kids staring at him, so he doesn’t acknowledge it.

"But you dated Nancy," Mike says, brows furrowed. He glances around at the other kids like maybe one of them will jump up and say "gotcha!" like they're pranking him or something.

"Yeah," Steve replies.

"Why would you date Nancy if you didn't like her? Girls," Mike says.

"I do," Steve says. "I loved Nancy. I like girls," Steve says.

"But…" Lucas says, trailing off like he's trying to find the words.

"You can like both?" El asks, gentle and curious.

"Yeah. Yes," Steve says. "I just… I wanted you to know."

“Like David Bowie,” Robin says, clearly trying to help. “Or Elton John.”

Max, who has pulled her knees up to her chest and is resting her head on them, tilts her head and asks, "Did you know, Robin?"

"Yes," Robin says, pushing her hair behind her ear. She cuts her eyes over to Steve again and then away quickly.

"Oh," Max says. "Okay."

"It's just… Well," Steve says, running a hand through his hair again. At this point, he's a little worried it's going to start affecting his hairline. "I just want you all to know you can talk to us if you need anything. If you need to talk about anything. No secrets."

"Does Nancy know?" Mike asks.

"You're really hung up on Nancy, dude; this is about Steve," Dustin says.

"I just want to know," Mike says.

"No, I get that," Steve says. "I have not told Nancy. I haven't told Jonathan, either, if anyone is wondering. Just… Well, the only people that know are in this room right now."

Max opens her mouth like she's going to say something but then snaps it shut again. The way she tucks her head down and presses her mouth to her knees gives Steve the impression she’d rather he pretend not to have noticed, so he doesn’t say anything about it.

"Anyway, sorry for interrupting your game," Steve says. "I'm going to go order pizza."

From the kitchen he can hear the general buzz of conversation in the next room, but he doesn't let himself focus on it long enough to actually hear them. He's leaning on the counter, eyes closed, taking deep breaths in an attempt to calm his racing heart, when a voice makes him jump.

"Hey," Will says, voice so soft he’s practically whispering.

"Hey," Steve says, trying to turn his jumpiness into something that appears a little more casual than that somehow. He's pretty sure he fails, but Will doesn't call him out on it, which is one of the reasons that Will is his favorite. "What's up?"

"I just wanted to say, like… thank you for telling us. I think they're all kind of surprised or whatever, but they'll settle down. It's cool that you trust us like that," Will says. His cheeks are pink.

"Oh. Well, um. No problem, man. Anytime, you know," Steve says, unsure of what to say. Will nods a little too long for it to look entirely natural.

"I think…" he says, but then he trails off. Steve moves to settle into one of the island stools.

"You think?" Steve prompts, pushing another stool out in invitation. Will comes over and sits down, chewing his lip.

"I think you should tell Jonathan and Nancy," he says. "I think they'll be okay about it. I mean. I don't know. Obviously it’s your choice or whatever, I just think that they'll be nice and then… then you can talk about it."

Steve smiles at him.

"Yeah, I was going to tell them soon. Before you all go back home, I think. They're coming over tomorrow," Steve says.

Will smiles wider. "Oh, cool. I think that's a good idea."

Steve smiles, a little bemused. "Yeah, you said that."

Will laughs almost nervously and turns a little more pink. "Tell me what they think, okay? If that's alright."

"Yeah, no problem," Steve says. He reaches out and ruffles Will's hair, which earns him some swatting and even more laughter.

"Alright, I should go back," Will says, making like he's going to hop down off the stool again. "I told them I was going to use the bathroom."

"Wait, just a second," Steve says, laying a hand on Will's arm. "How are they taking it? Without me in the room, you know?"

Will smiles, small and secretive. "Really well, Steve," he says. "They think it's cool that you told us. Like I said, they’re just a little surprised."

Steve smiles too, unable to fight it off his face in his attempt to keep cool and casual. "Alright. Keep me updated? If they feel differently when Robin and I are both not there, I mean."

"You got it," Will says.

"Thanks, Will," Steve says. "This is why you're my favorite."

Will rolls his eyes fondly. "What if I told Dustin you said that?" he asks, halfway to the doorway.

"Please don't," Steve says. "He'd never let me live it down."

Will laughs and goes back into the family room. Steve feels like a weight has lifted. He feels like he's floating. He knows that's dramatic, but he can't even help it. He loves these kids, he really does. He hopes he gets to be friends with them forever. Ask him two years ago and he never would have believed you, but he loves these kids like they are the siblings he never had and he can't imagine, now, what it would be like to not have them around. His heart rate has settled down now and he thinks that he can thank Will for it, if he's honest.

He calls for the pizza with a smile on his face, and he orders extra pepperoni because he knows Will likes it that way but would never ask.

\--

Max corners him later that night, quiet but urgent, while the other kids are arguing over a movie and he's grabbing plates and napkins.

Sometimes, in his nightmares, he sees Billy, bloody and screaming and fists flying at Steve's face and then he transforms and he's weak and bloody and begging for help and Steve is reaching and reaching and he never gets there soon enough and it's just that wrecked voice _help me, please help me..._

And he wakes up heaving, with visions of Max's bloodshot eyes burned into his brain, her tear covered face. Sometimes he can't help thinking that if they had all tried a little harder, if they had been a little quicker, if they hadn't been so eager to believe it was all over, maybe none of this would have happened. It's always like this, all the people they didn't save and how he could have done better. The way Max is looking at him now, that's all he can think about.

"You okay?" he asks, because he can't wait her out when she looks like that. She hesitates another moment, looking at him with wide eyes, and then she darts in quick and wraps her arms tight around his waist. He's startled for only a second and then he hugs her back, rubbing her shoulders.

"It was my fault we had to come here," she mumbles against his chest. He furrows his brows.

"What?" He tries to lean back to look at her but she tightens her grip so he can't.

"I accidentally told Neil that Billy was hanging out with someone he wasn't supposed to. Neil wanted to get away anyway, said the neighbors were too nosy and he knew some people out in Indiana that could get him a job. It was the last straw. Billy resented me for it, and I resented him for resenting me and it was hard to get past all of that. I didn't know, but Billy didn't care. He told me to stay out of his business. I never got to tell him that I wouldn't have told if I knew.

"I just..." she stalls out, her voice cracking a little. "I just wish that things had been different. It was no excuse for the person he was, but it had to be hard. So I guess I just want to say thank you for telling us."

Steve is a little slow on a good day, he'll admit, but this he gets right away. The way she won't look at him, the dampness he can feel soaking through his shirt, the fragility of her voice. He squeezes just a little tighter before letting her go. She steps back, ducking her head down to rub at her cheek with her shoulder, real quick like she hopes he won't notice. He doesn't mention it.

"Thank you for telling me, Max," he says, a rare moment of sincerity. "I want... I want you to feel like you can talk to me about things, okay?"

She smiles slightly, just a half turn of her mouth.

"Duh, Steve. Why else would we keep you around?"

But he can tell what she really means. Call it brotherly intuition.

"And that wasn't your fault, okay?" He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes, ducking his head a little to catch her eye. "That was all Neil, do you hear me? You didn't know, you were just a kid. None of this is your fault."

Max wrinkles up her face a little. "None of it is your fault, either, but you still feel guilty about it, don’t you?"

"That's different," Steve says, even though he knows it isn't. Not really.

"It's not," Max says, shrugging. "But we all have our stuff, right?"

Steve is constantly floored by the emotional maturity of these kids. Of course, they can be childish little shitheads most of the time, but they're kids who have fought monsters so he kind of thinks they have a right to be shitheads. Especially when it is sometimes balanced out with stuff like this. He knows he was not this mature when he was their age. He isn't even sure he's this mature now.

He smiles halfway at Max.

"Yeah, guess so," he says. "Help me carry these plates."

She takes them from him and he can see her flipping the switch back to Public Max, her face a little sharper. Steve laughs brightly when she walks back into the family room and loudly announces that Will and El get plates first because they're her favorites, much to Lucas's loud objections.

He flops back down on the couch next to Robin and tries not to let the guilt tug slowly at his bones.

\--

Robin answers the door when Jonathan and Nancy come to pick up Will, El, and Mike. Steve is in the kitchen washing their pizza plates and singing along to the radio when El and Mike come in to talk to him.

“So you _do_ sing,” Mike says, eyes narrowed. Steve laughs outright and El rolls her eyes.

"Thanks for having us, Steve," El says, bumping her shoulder against his side.

"Of course," Steve says, shutting the sink off.

"I have a question," Mike kind of announces.

"Mike," El whisper-shouts. Steve swallows another laugh.

"It's alright. Curiosity is knowledge or whatever Dustin is always saying, right?"

"Yeah, sure," Mike says. "Did you invite us over just to tell us?"

"What?"

"Did you actually want us to come over?"

"Well, yeah," Steve says, confused. "Of course I did. I like having you guys over here. Plus, El and Will are leaving again soon and then Dustin is back off to nerd camp, so."

"Right. Okay. Um," Mike hesitates. "Well it's cool that you told us that, I guess. Not that you're cool or anything."

Steve actually does laugh this time. "Okay, Wheeler, don't hurt yourself there."

Mike rolls his eyes so hard it looks like it hurts and El leans into his side.

"Happy," she says, simply. "We should all be happy."

Steve smiles at her, fondness spreading through his whole body.

"No more nightmares, kid?" he asks.

She shrugs. "Sometimes."

"You know you can call me?"

"Me too," Mike says. El smiles at them both, looking pleased.

"See? Happy," she says. "I'm okay."

"Hey, guys, are you ready to go?" Will says, leaning in through the doorway.

"Yeah, coming," Mike says, startling a little.

"Later, nerds," Steve says, bumping El's shoulder with his fist and ruffling Mike's hair just to see him scramble to fix it. El giggles and Mike scowls and Steve is just happy.

\--

Steve is then tasked with dropping off Max, Lucas, Dustin, and Robin. 

Before getting out of the car, Lucas leans between the two front seats, claps him on the shoulder, and says, “you are still the lamest cool kid I know, but you do good voices. See you soon,” and then practically launches himself out of the back door of the car.

Steve drops off Dustin last, even after Robin, even though it means taking the longest routes possible through Hawkins. This is partially out of habit, used to stopping inside to talk to Mrs. Henderson for a little while, but tonight he has other motives as well. It’s alright, he likes to drive.

"So," he starts, clearing his throat and turning the radio down a little. Dustin looks over, tilting his head to the side like an interested puppy. "Are we cool?"

"What?" Dustin scoffs. "Dude! Of course we're cool, what kind of guy do you think I am?"

"Well, I don't know!" Steve says defensively. "I have to be sure! I don't want you to, like, look at me differently now or something."

"Steve," Dustin says, very seriously. "You are like a brother to me. A brother that I forcibly adopted into my life. You can't get rid of me that easily."

Steve laughs, his chest feeling lighter. He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel.

"Cool," he says. "I'm glad."

"This just means you can give me all kinds of advice now," Dustin says. Steve's eyebrows shoot up and he throws a surprised glance over at Dustin.

"What kind of advice do you think I'll have, Henderson? What do you even want to know?"

Dustin shrugs. "I guess we'll have to figure that out when we get to it. I'm an academic, Steve, a scientist. Who knows where my curiosity voyage will take me?"

Steve huffs a laugh and rolls his eyes and Dustin leans over to turn the music up again, declaring his love for the song that's playing and singing along, and Steve thinks that maybe this really will be okay. Maybe it will all be alright now, if everyone reacts like this.

\--

It’s like as soon as he wakes up the next day, all of his nerves come flooding back to him. Robin’s coming over at eleven and Jonathan and Nancy are coming over at twelve and they are planning on hanging out around back, barbecuing and maybe even swimming and at some point during this lazy teenage day they have planned, he is going to tell them. He is going to put a pause on the relaxation and say “hey, so I like guys,” and then what?

Yeah, he can’t do this, actually. He definitely cannot do this.

He pulls a pillow over his face and briefly considers just smothering himself, but then he decides he is being overly dramatic and just groans a little before finally getting up.

He overthinks while brushing his teeth and while he is in the shower and while he is getting dressed for the day and while he is doing his hair and he is pretty sure he has run through every horrifying possibility for what may happen when he tells them by time he goes down to let Robin in.

His mental list of possible reactions range from a reasonable but polite excuse to leave and never talk to him again to Nancy shoving him in the pool and running screaming from the yard. He can’t imagine a scenario in which they react positively, the best reaction he can picture would them being nice in the moment and then just disappearing from his life forever. Sure, they were cool about Robin, but it would be different with him, wouldn’t it be? They know him better, they had reason not to trust him or care or show him kindness. He certainly would not blame them for it, after all the things he has done. He wants to think it will go well, but he just… can’t.

He opens the door and Robin’s standing there with a pie in hand. She smirks when she sees him.

“Seriously?” she asks.

“What?” he replies, almost but not quite self conscious. He runs a hand through his hair.

Robin scoffs. “Nothing, dingus,” she says, stepping into the house. “Nice shirt,” she says, and he pulls absentmindedly at the hem. It was a gift, he thinks, from the kids. It has some graphic design on it of a machine that he thinks is from Star Wars.

“Thanks,” he says, a little lost. “What did you make?”

“Sour-sweet cherry pie,” she says, heading straight for the kitchen and sticking the pie plate on the island countertop.

“That sounds awesome,” Steve says.

“It is,” she tells him, smiling cheekily. “So what’s the plan?”

“Nancy and Jonathan will be here in an hour. After that, we’ll start grilling and hanging out I guess and then hopefully some miracle will happen and I just won’t have to tell them for whatever reason and everyone can go home like nothing ever happened,” Steve says. Nothing will have to change, he thinks.

Robin rolls her eyes affectionately. “Sure, Steve,” she teases. She pauses for a second and then continues, a little more seriously this time. “Seriously, though, Steve, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. This is entirely your decision and your life and nobody is expecting you to do something you aren't comfortable with.”

Steve sighs. “Yeah, Rob, I know. I know that, and I _do_ want to tell them, it’s just that I keep thinking about all the ways they might react, you know? And none of them are good.”

“That’s understandable,” Robin replies, leaning back against the counter and watching him carefully.

“Is it, though? I mean, they reacted just fine to you, so what am I even worried about, right? I’m just being dramatic,” he says. Saying it out loud doesn’t actually make him feel any better about the whole thing, if he’s honest, even though he feels like maybe it should.

“Well, they reacted fine with _me_ ,” Robin says. “But I can see why you would be worried they would react differently when it’s you. You have known them longer, there is… well, I guess there is kind of more at stake, right? Or at least it feels that way right now. Plus there’s how they reacted to _you_ about me. So I get it, you’re nervous and I don’t blame you.”

“I guess so.”

“I think it will be okay, but I don’t want to dismiss how you’re feeling because I know that it can be scary. But at least you know that no matter what happens, the kids are going to love you no matter what,” she says. Steve smiles.

“Little gremlins that they are, yeah,” he replies. Robin laughs brightly at that. “Anyway, do you have a swim suit?”

“Yeah, I’m wearing it under this,” she says, gesturing to her t shirt and shorts. “And I have a change of clothes in my bag just in case, because I know how much you love throwing people in the pool.”

Her laugh is bright and warm, and it makes Steve smile. She looks happy and pretty and she’s got her hair knotted on top of her head in a really casual way. A year ago he might have swooned a little.

There are three sharp knocks on the door.

“They’re early,” Steve says, turning to glance over his shoulder. He feels the nervousness clawing at his throat again.

“You want me to get it?” Robin asks when he doesn’t move right away.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, I’ll go get it.”

He pulls the door open to find Nancy with her hand raised like she was going to knock again.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Nancy replies.

“Is that a crop top?” Jonathan asks from behind her. Steve touches the hem again and both Nancy and Jonathan look down.

“Um. Yeah. The kids gave it to me for Christmas and I… cut it,” Steve says, lamely.

“Right,” Jonathan says.

“Okay, um. Robin is already here, so we can just. Go back.” Steve steps aside to let them in.

“We brought some stuff to make burgers,” Nancy says, and Jonathan holds up a bag as if to prove it.

“Oh, cool,” Steve replies, shutting the door. “Robin brought a pie.”

“Sour-sweet cherry,” Robin says as they enter the room, looking up from her nails.

“Sounds delicious,” Jonathan says, putting the bag on the counter.

“Thank you.” Robin smiles. “Should we go outside now?”

“Sure,” Nancy says.

“Did you bring a swimsuit?” Robin asks.

“Yeah, we have them in my bag. I don’t know if we’ll swim, though, but we can change if we decide to,” Nancy says.

“Yeah, okay,” Robin says, nodding. She grabs the pie to stick in the fridge and heads out through the family room and through the sliding door to the back patio.

Steve had set up the grill and an outdoor table for this, because he was nervous and the best way for him to settle his own nerves was to prepare for every part of it except the one that really mattered. He even hooked up the stereo so that he could bring it outside. He flicks it on as he passes, tunes it to the local pop station because it’s the one he knows best. He glances over at Jonathan, who is rolling his eyes, but he’s also smiling like he doesn’t really mind. Steve ducks his head to hide that he’s smiling too.

Jonathan heads straight for the grill, like he knows Steve doesn’t really know his way around it, which, fair enough. Steve can cook, but when his parents are around it’s always his dad manning the grill and when he had friends over… well, he didn’t really have a whole lot of friends coming over if it wasn’t for a party and Tommy and Carol were not exactly the “sit out back and grill” type, so he never really learned. He’s reasonably confident he could get through it all without burning himself or the burgers, but he is totally willing to take a back seat to Jonathan on this one. He seems to know what he’s doing.

Still, though, he goes over to stand next to Jonathan and grab things for him as he needs them, joking and laughing together. Nancy and Robin are chatting at the table, and they look happy enough whenever Steve looks over at them.

“It’s so hot out here,” Jonathan says, pulling at the front of his t-shirt to fan himself. He is red faced and he looks a little damp and, embarrassingly, Steve finds it all hopelessly charming.

“It is pretty hot,” he says. He reaches over and points to a burger that is ready to flip and Jonathan obliges him.

“Like you would even know,” Jonathan says, tone light and joking. “You’re practically not even wearing clothes.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, okay, I’m not wearing jeans in June, that’s totally a crazy thing to say,” he teases back.

Jonathan tilts a smile in his direction and flips one of the burgers. “Sure,” he says. “Maybe it also helps that you’re standing over there, and I’m doing all this hard work.” Jonathan gestures at him with his spatula and Steve pretends to be offended.

“Hey! I am _helping_ ,” Steve says, unable to stop himself from laughing.

“Sure, well since you are so _helpful_ , why don’t you grab me a plate for these,” Jonathan says.

“I’m not feeling very appreciated,” Steve says, leaning over to grab the plates off the table. Jonathan starts coughing pretty hard and Steve says, “You okay, dude?”

“I’m cool,” Jonathan says, voice cracking a little. “Inhaled some smoke, I think.”

Nancy hops up from the table and takes the spatula from Jonathan. “Go drink some water,” she says, voice concerned. Steve glances at Robin and she looks like she is trying hard not to laugh. Jonathan goes inside and comes back out with a glass of water. He looks kind of embarrassed about the whole thing. Nancy transfers the burgers to the plate Steve is holding with an efficiency he is kind of amazed by, but not really surprised. Efficiency is practically Nancy’s middle name.

By time that’s settled, Jonathan and Robin are engaged in conversation at the table, condiments and hamburger buns spread out in the middle of the table for easy picking.

They chat their way through eating their burgers and when they finish, Robin leans back as far as she can in her chair.

“Well. I feel like now is a great time for a swim,” she says.

“You have to wait thirty minutes,” Nancy tells her, looking apologetic but also like she is not all that sorry at all. Robin groans.

“Boring,” she says, but she sits up straight again and starts gathering up things on the table. “Steve, come on, we’re cleaning up now.”

Steve, who has also only just finished his burger, starts grabbing plates and hamburger buns and follows Robin inside. As soon as the door has slid shut behind them, she whirls on him, a wild look in her eyes.

“Steve,” she says.

“What?” he replies, taking a step back from her.

“ _Steven,_ ” she says, that intense look on her face that she gets sometimes. Steve shakes his head.

“ _What?_ ” he asks again. Robin scoffs and turns on her heel to head into the kitchen.

“Okay, then,” Steve says, putting away the things he’s carrying.

“I’m just saying,” Robin starts hotly, then she pauses to take a deep breath. “I just forget, sometimes, how oblivious you can be to certain things.”

Steve shrugs. “Yeah, I’m pretty dumb. What did I miss this time?” he asks.

“You’re not _dumb_ ,” Robin says. “How many times do we have to talk about this? You just have different strengths.”

“Thanks, Mr. Rogers,” Steve replies, leaning against the counter when he finishes putting things away.

“You’re welcome,” she says. “Let’s put it this way. You were… very appreciated out there. It was disturbing for me, but what are you going to do, right? The heart wants what it wants and all that.”

“I’m still confused,” Steve says.

Robin sighs and smiles fondly at him. “You’re hopeless,” she says reaching over to pat his cheek. He swats her away with a scowl. “You are so lucky you’ve got that face because otherwise I would just find you so annoying.”

“I… okay,” he replies, feeling lost.

“It’s those puppy dog eyes, Harrington. That’s how I know you’re being serious and not just fishing for compliments. Let’s go back out before they come looking for us, hm?” Robin says.

“Okay,” Steve replies, feeling like something important escaped his notice. When they come back outside, Nancy and Jonathan are talking with their heads ducked together and Steve is overcome with how much he wants to be a part of conversations like that, how badly he wants to know what they’re talking about.

“Has it been thirty minutes yet?” Robin asks. Jonathan checks his watch.

“It’s been about ten, Rob, sorry,” he says, looking more amused than apologetic. Robin groans again. She’s putting on a show, Steve realizes, playing things up. He thinks it might be for him, to make him feel more comfortable, to ease what he plans to do today. She doesn’t have to do that and he finds himself comforted by it. Even if she isn’t doing it for him, it is working to relax him.

“But it’s _hot_ ,” she says, almost whines, flopping back down in her chair. Nancy rolls her eyes, not unkindly. Steve is struck yet again by how far they have come since last July when Nancy snapped at Robin for simply talking. Steve finds it easy to settle into the rhythm of their conversation, so much so that he spaces out from it for the most part. He leans his head against the back of his chair and shuts his eyes.

The sun is warm on his face and the sound of Robin, Jonathan, and Nancy laughing is soothing. He doesn't think that he could be here and happy in the same way with Tommy and Carol. They didn’t ever really enjoy just sitting around, they always wanted to be doing things – usually drinking his dads’ beer and almost breaking things but usually not actually breaking them. Usually.

“Okay,” Robin says a while later, clapping. “I’m going swimming now. Come on, Steve.”

He sits up straighter and blinks at her a few times. “Sure,” he says, pushing himself up. Robin takes off her shorts and her t-shirt and heads for the pool, sitting down on the edge and sliding in. Steve looks back at Jonathan and Nancy, brows furrowed. He doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to push, but he also feels weird about leaving them here alone.

“Do you,” Steve starts, trailing off.

“We’ll come swimming,” Nancy says, glancing at Jonathan and back up to Steve.

“Really?” Steve asks, feeling surprised.

“Yeah,” Nancy says. “We just have to change.”

“Oh. Okay,” Steve says, smiling and nodding. “Cool. Um. I mean, you know where the bathroom is, right?”

“Yeah.” Nancy smiles.

“What made you change your mind?” he asks. Nancy has not used the pool very much since… well, since the fall of ’83. Steve gets it. So he was not expecting her to get in the pool again.

“It’s like you said,” Nancy replies, standing up and pulling Jonathan up with her. “Being scared of the pool is not going to bring her back, and she didn’t… well, that isn’t where she died anyway, it’s just a pool. There isn’t anything we can do to change it. And besides, Robin seems to really love swimming.”

“Oh,” Steve says, nodding. “Okay.”

“So we’ll be right back, then,” Nancy says, grabbing her bag. Jonathan smiles and they head back inside.

Steve remembers the conversation Nancy is talking about. They fought about that actually. She thought that he didn’t care about what happened and he didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t know how to prove that he cared about Barb and what happened to her – he felt helpless at the time, like he has pretty often since, and he couldn’t deal with all the things that were out of his control. 

He pulls off his t-shirt and gets in the pool with Robin and she splashes him. He sputters in her direction and splashes her back. She lets out a high pitched peel of laughter.

She has these freckles on her shoulders that remind him of Nancy. Her one piece swimsuit is the same navy blue as the Scoops uniform was.

They continue splashing each other until the back door slides open again.

“You got him to get his hair wet?” Jonathan jokes. Steve looks over and Jonathan is wearing black swim trunks and white t shirt and Nancy is wearing a purple one piece with a fake skirt on it. He’s pretty sure that it’s a new suit.

“She attacked me, actually,” Steve says seriously.

“Oh no,” Jonathan says, faux concerned. He and Nancy sit down on the edge of the pool and Robin splashes them too. Nancy laughs brightly and kicks some water at Robin.

“You see?” he asks. “She is a menace.”

“I’m sure you deserved it,” Jonathan says.

“He did,” Robin tells them. “Look at him over there, why does his hair look like that?”

“Hey!” Steve protests. “Who do you think you are?”

“Let him enjoy it, guys, he might not have that hair forever,” Nancy says. Steve turns on her, betrayed.

“Nancy, I thought we were _friends_ ,” he says. She laughs very prettily. He is going to tell her he is going to tell her he is going to tell her –

Robin splashes him directly in the face.

“Back to earth, dingus,” she says. He looks back at her and splashes her again.

“You okay, Steve? You’re acting kind of strange,” Jonathan says.

“He is kind of strange,” Robin says.

“Sure, but more now than usual.”

“I-“ Steve starts, then pauses again. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“The kids said the same,” Nancy adds. “They said you have been acting weird for weeks.”

“I do not act weird ever,” Steve says.

“Well there you have it,” Robin says, kicking up onto her back and floating there.

“Right,” Jonathan says, kicking his feet and making little splashes in the water. “Okay, never mind. Sorry.”

Steve has a brief flash in his mind where he swims up to Jonathan and wraps his hands around his ankles and something about that is just so –

He closes his eyes and swallows hard and when he opens them again, Nancy has slid into the water and she’s coaxing Jonathan into the pool with a hand on his calf. Sometimes it’s like she reaches into his mind and pulls out the embarrassing thoughts he has and she just acts them out in front of him. He feels like his face is on fire.

He kicks his legs up and starts floating on his back, hair be damned, because Robin kind of has the right idea about that one. And besides, he is pretty sure his hair has already been through hell today from all the splashing, so it is what it is. He shuts his eyes against the sun and his eyelids light up red. The sun is warm and he feels really good.

He’s floating for a few minutes when he hears something move just off to the side of him, just the smallest splash, and he tenses up at it. Next thing he knows, there is water being splashed across his face and he shoots upright, sputtering and laughing, trying to blink the water from his eyes.

“Jesus,” he says, blinking his eyes open. His eyelashes are wet and Robin is smiling brightly at him from a few feet away so he splashes her back. Next thing he knows, Jonathan and Nancy are chasing each other around the pool, splashing wildly. Steve and Robin join in chasing them and each other and soon all four of them are breathless with laughter and there is water splashed all over and Steve grabs hold of the edge and makes a decision in the moment.

“I have something to tell you guys,” he says, laughter crowding in around the edges. Robin, for her part, just barely doesn’t freeze and it is probably, partially because of the fact that her momentum in the water keeps her going. Jonathan slows to a stop, taking a deep breath to stop himself laughing, and Nancy glides into the wall and props herself up on it.

“Steve?” Robin says, curiously. He glances at them, this group of friends he has accumulated, and he smiles.

“Yeah, Rob?” he replies.

“You sure about this?” she asks. Steve nods.

“Yeah, I think so. Yes,” he says. Robin swims over to him slowly, a broad smile spreading on her face.

“Cool,” she says, bumping shoulders with him.

He feels a little buzzy with nerves, but not in a bad way he doesn’t think. He feels the laughter in his chest still and Nancy’s face is still bright with laughter and Jonathan looks red and flustered and Robin looks excited, so it gives him a bubbly confidence.

“I like guys,” Steve says, and it’s easier this time than ever before, there’s a lightness in his chest when he says it. It’s not that he is getting used to saying it, but maybe just that he trusts them.

And then they don’t say anything and it kind of gets… a little less funny. That lightness in his chest tightens up a little and his shoulders curl forward involuntarily and he can feel his brows furrowing.

“I mean, uh,” he says, floundering a bit.

“Is this a joke?” Nancy asks, looking kind of angry. He has not seen her look that angry with him almost two years and he feels small like he did at that stupid party.

“What?” he asks. Jonathan is not saying anything at all.

“What kind of a joke would that be? You think I would let him make some kind of unfunny coming out joke right now?” Robin asks, looking and sounding annoyed. 

“Well I don’t know,” Nancy snaps back. “A bad one.”

“God, how can I undo the last two minutes of my life,” Steve says, squeezing his eyes shut like he’ll wake up and this will not have happened or maybe if he can’t see it, it does not exist.

“Is it... not a joke?” Jonathan asks, brow raised.

“I’m just going to drown myself real quick,” Steve says softly, sliding down against the wall. Robin slings her arm around his shoulders and tightens her hand to keep him from submerging himself.

“Oh god,” Nancy says. Steve, reluctantly, looks at her and she is red faced and wild eyed.

“I’m sorry,” he says, feeling like his throat is closing up. “I should not have said anything, I really should not have said anything.”

“No!” Nancy replies, her hands flying up. She’s got small hands and he always really liked that about her, the way they fit in his. Right now, his brain seems to be latching onto anything other than this moment. “No, I’m sorry. That was… I should not have assumed you were making fun.”

“Of what?” he asks, feeling wild with it, and a little angry too. He feels set adrift and yet this one statement brought him back. She says things sometimes that Steve does not understand, and this is one of them. He thinks, absently, about the neighbors, and he hopes that they’re all keeping their voices appropriately low, but he can’t be sure because the buzzing in his ears is making it hard to concentrate on things like volume control. “Why would I be making fun?”

Nancy shrugs and looks over to Jonathan. Distantly, there is some Queen song playing on the radio. It feels both grounding and off putting to hear it right now. Jonathan looks back at Nancy like he does not want to be made a part of this anymore.

“Making fun of me,” Jonathan says, quietly.

“What?” Steve asks, brows furrowing even harder. He shakes his head a little, trying to knock loose the fog that is filling up the space between his ears.

“I mean. Because of all those things you said,” Jonathan trails off, face going pink. “Back… before, you know. About me.”

“Oh,” Steve says. He feels like he has been punched, the wind knocked out of him. “Right.”

“What things?” Robin asks, leaning towards Steve.

“I, uh. I think I have to go inside for a minute,” Steve says, already turning out of Robin’s grasp. “I have to… I will be right back.”

He pulls himself out of the pool right there and heads for the door, hardly slowing down to grab a towel off the table, that little part of his brain that sounds a lot like his mom whispering to him about not dripping all over the floors guiding him through wrapping the towel around his waist.

Nobody calls after him, or maybe he just does not hear it because his brain is so clogged up with self deprecating thoughts – another phrase Robin explained to him: thinking mean things about yourself that aren’t deserved, because everyone should be a little kinder to themselves. They had been laying in his bed and he had said something negative about himself and she had said that for someone so overly confident, he was remarkable self deprecating, and Steve had asked what that meant. She had smiled and explained it and it felt weirdly good to have a word for it now. A word to describe the way he feels sometimes.

He gets inside and the cold air prickles at his skin, shocking him back to reality ever so slightly. He slides the door shut behind him, careful not to actually look outside, and heads straight for his room in his only slightly less dazed state.

He gets to his room and sits down directly on the floor, worries about soaking the carpet be damned, and shivers silently for a while, staring at a wall until his eyes burn. He has made mistakes that he will never be able to undo, said things he will never be able to unsay, and he deserved this. Being the way he is was no excuse for the way he acted, and he does not deserve to be forgiven for it. It still hurts, though, he has to admit that much. It takes him a few seconds to realize that that far away gasping sound is him, that he is crying for the first time in a long time, full and outright. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and curls in on himself, embarrassed even though he is alone. Embarrassed, perhaps, because he is alone.

He wonders, idly, what they’re all saying about him out there. If Nancy and Jonathan are telling Robin the things about him that he has tried to hide, tried to make up for, and she is finally going to realize the truth of him and leave and never come back. He thinks of their plans for the fall, of the apartments they have been looking at in the paper and of the money he has been dutifully saving up. Of the community college acceptance letter sitting in his night stand drawer that he was so proud of just a few weeks ago.

He had not told anyone but Robin about it, not even his parents, not that they had asked. He thinks they had written him off as a lost cause, doomed to work at Family Video forever or until his dad took pity on him and gave him a menial job at his company, whichever came first. Now, he supposes, he actually will end up falling into the nightmare of a life his parents have always had planned for him.

He knew better than to do this, he knew that this would light a fuse on the ticking time bomb of his life and yet he thought that he could do it and he would be fine. He was a fool for thinking that, for letting himself grow comfortable with this thing he was always so afraid of.

He thinks that all the good he has done, all the times he had thrown himself between danger and the people he loves, none of it will ever make up for the things he has done and none of it will ever make up for this thing inside of him. He was wrong for thinking that he could keep these friendships after all of it. They know him too well, they know what he has to hide.

He hears a creak on the stairs and he is flooded with embarrassment once again, tries to force his shoulders to stop shaking, tries desperately to wipe the tears from his face. His whole life, come crashing down around his shoulders. All the things he had planned or dreamed of or wanted: gone. And he had known better. All of this was running on borrowed time.

There is a light knock on his door frame and Steve’s entire body seizes up. He can’t breathe, suddenly, can’t think of anything but how embarrassed he is in this moment. How embarrassed he is to be caught, curled up on his bedroom floor, shivering and crying. If he does not open his eyes maybe it will not be real – this trick has never worked for him before, but there is nothing that says to stop trying.

“Steve,” a voice says softly, and Steve was expecting Robin but he gets Jonathan, which is somehow even worse. He remembers that night, months ago now, where he was expecting Robin and got Nancy and a pack of cigarettes. He thinks maybe he should stop expecting things. He also thinks that if his throat gets any tighter he may cease breathing all together. He is weighing the pros and cons of this, as well as considering the probability that he will gain the power of invisibility, when Jonathan speaks again.

“Steve, can I come in? I just want to talk,” he says, voice that gentle timbre it has always been, the one that Steve dreams about some nights. He feels like his whole body is on fire but he drags his hands over his face one last time and manages to get out a “sure,” his voice only cracking slightly when he does.

He looks over and tilts a smile at Jonathan, despite the fact that his face is guaranteed to be red and puffy and his eyes must look absolutely wild. “What’s up?” he says.

Jonathan sits down next to him on the carpet and seems to turn over his words in his head.

“I’m sorry for… how we reacted out there. That was not fair to you at all,” he says. He has his eyes trained carefully on Steve’s face. Steve shrugs and runs a hand through his hair, like he doesn’t care even though he clearly does. He leans back against the wall and fixes his eyes on the ceiling.

“No worries, man, I get it. It’s pretty fucked up, huh?” he asks.

“What?” Jonathan asks.

“This whole thing,” Steve says, gesturing vaguely. “Me.”

Jonathan shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. Steve rolls his head against the wall to look at him, one eyebrow raised.

“Sure, that’s how it seemed outside as well,” Steve says. Jonathan is looking at him with this strange expression on and Steve smiles again, a halfway smile, a sadness deep in his chest. The thing about Jonathan is that Steve kind of wishes sometimes that he was him. That he had a mom like Joyce or a brother like Will. That he did not live in a big empty house or pick fights because he was afraid of losing things. That he did not fulfill the prophecy of his fears by losing it all anyway. Jonathan has had a hard life, but Steve thinks he is lucky because he has experienced love and happiness and laughter that Steve has never had. And he earned it, too. Steve, on the other hand, has not.

“I was… afraid,” Jonathan says, almost a whisper. “Afraid that you had figured me out.”

“What?” Steve asks. Jonathan leans back against the wall as well, shuts his eyes.

“I thought you had figured out that I like guys,” he says, and it comes out smooth and easy and Steve thinks maybe he is pretending Steve is not here, like if he keeps his eyes closed, he can picture himself in an empty room speaking the words to open air.

“Oh,” Steve says, surprised. “I… I mean, for what it is worth, I did not figure that out.”

Jonathan snorts a little laugh. “Yeah, I figured that out a little late,” he says, letting his eyes fall open again. He’s got this small smile on his face. The room feels small and close and quiet, like it’s just the two of them here alone in the universe. It is, somehow, not that terrifying of an idea, even though it maybe should be.

“So that’s why…” Steve pauses, considering. He is struck by realization. “So, Nancy knows, then.”

It’s not really a question, but Jonathan nods anyway. “Yeah. It was… I couldn’t keep it from her, you know? It was… something happened, and I explained it, and she understood.”

“Something happened,” Steve says, looking back up at the ceiling. “I can’t… I can’t imagine what that could be. I had never even dreamed of telling her, honestly. I thought, maybe, it would just go away. If I’m honest, I thought Nancy and I were going to be together forever, so it was never going to matter.” Steve laughs again, at himself mostly. He shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “It’s stupid, I know, but I guess it was one of those hopes. Like how you think your life is going to turn out a certain way and you think if you want it bad enough it will happen.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan says; breathes, more like it. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“Things like that don’t work out, though I guess. Maybe I should have just told her. I thought it would make her like me less, but as it turns out, that was not a problem I had to be concerned about,” Steve says. He has her angry face behind his eyelids, Jonathan looking concerned when he followed him out of the party. His world narrowed down to two people who did not want him, not as a friend or as anything else, but wanted each other instead. He should have seen it coming. In fact, he did. But he ignored it and now here he is.

He is glad to have them as friends, he really is. But the truth of it is that he wants, so much he can’t even stand it most days. He wants until his bones ache with it, until the guilt threatens to swallow him up.

“It was… the thing that happened,” Jonathan says, voice thick. Steve opens his eyes to look at him again and his face is red.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, man,” Steve says.

“No, I do want to. I’m just… nervous,” Jonathan says.

“Would it help if I, like, close my eyes or something? So I’m not looking at you when you say it?” Steve asks. Jonathan hums considering.

“Yeah, maybe,” Jonathan says, nodding.

“Alright,” Steve says. He shuts his eyes but doesn’t turn his face away from Jonathan, his attempt at being supportive and non-intrusive.

“It was you,” Jonathan says, and Steve feels his own eyebrows shoot up, but he keeps his eyes closed. He can picture Jonathan’s red face in his mind. Jonathan is still talking barely above a whisper, like if he spoke any louder the moment would crack in the middle and they would fall apart. “You were… I don’t remember exactly when it was. I just remember I… We were talking about you. I had asked if she missed you and she said she did. And I asked what… what it was like. For you two. And she said it was nice, easy in some ways.

“But she said that it was hard because she didn’t think she deserved it being easy. She didn’t feel like she had earned a normal life, after Barb. And that was what you wanted to give her. So she lashed out at you because she was angry with herself and frustrated with everything that was happening and you were right there. For her, you were what tied her to that night.”

Steve swallows hard, his throat closing up again. He flinches a little when Jonathan’s cold hand slots up next to his, their pinkies touching, but Jonathan does not budge or pull away, and Steve feels the tension slowly starting to fade from his shoulders.

“So we talked about that for a while, and then I admitted that that wasn’t what I meant. I wanted to know… _about you_ ,” he says, emphasizing the words so that Steve will catch his meaning. Steve feels his face grow hot, he’s sure he is as red as a tomato. Jonathan clears his throat. “Well anyway, Nancy is a smart girl. She wanted to know why I was so curious, and I didn’t have any good answers for her, and eventually, she had gotten enough out of me to figure it out. I thought you were a real asshole, so it wasn’t a problem, but then I got to know you. I saw how you were with the kids and with Robin and with me and Nance and I just-“

Jonathan’s ramble cuts off abruptly and Steve can hear him inhale sharply.

“So, in any case, Nancy knows. She has known for a while now, and she is a little defensive about it,” he says.

“And that’s why she got so worked up over the thing with Robin?” Steve asks.

“Uh huh,” Jonathan says.

“And again today?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Jonathan replies. Steve feels like he’s on fire from just that little point of contact between their pinkies and wrists and the way he can kind of feel Jonathan’s breath on his face.

“Because she thought I had figured out you… uh, whatever, felt that way or just… whatever, about me?” Steve asks, wanting desperately to open his eyes.

“Feel,” Jonathan says, he whispers it like a confession and Steve gets lost in it.

“What?” he asks.

“Because of the way I feel,” Jonathan corrects.

“But what about Nancy?” Steve asks.

“I love Nancy,” Jonathan says. “She knows that. I love her more than anything. But she knows that I… she knows that it’s you too.”

“Can I open my eyes now?” Steve asks, shifting his hand a little so his pinky finger is on top of Jonathan’s. It feels forbidden and intoxicating.

“Sure,” Jonathan says. Steve blinks his eyes open and Jonathan’s red face is mere inches from his own.

“This isn’t a prank, is it?” Steve whispers. “Some kind of payback for the huge asshole I was in the past?”

“I think it is a little too personally embarrassing to be a prank,” Jonathan says, lips quirked up in the corners.

“And Nancy is…” Steve trails off, unsure of how to say this.

“Nancy is still outside, waiting for me to explain to you why we reacted the way we did.”

“So she, what? Doesn’t mind?” Steve asks.

“Steve, I think you need to talk to her first but she misses you, you should…” Jonathan pauses, like maybe he’s not sure if he should say what he was about to say. Steve can see in his eyes when his resolve solidifies. “You should hear the way she talks about you some days.”

“Oh,” Steve breathes out. Jonathan’s eyes are dark and full of implication. Steve licks his lips involuntarily and then he does it again, a little more intentional this time, when Jonathan’s eyes drop down.

“And you just… you walk around like this,” Jonathan says, eyes falling shut. “And you just… it is like you don’t even know, even though you clearly do.”

“Like I don’t know what?” Steve asks, a smile creeping across his face. Jonathan swallows and opens his eyes again.

“You run around in a _crop top_ and your swim trunks are so _short_ and _vibrant_ ,” Jonathan says, like the words offended him. “I almost thought you were doing it all on purpose.”

Steve shakes his head. “I had no idea, man, it was not intentional. Robin was making fun of me for it before you got here.”

“And your hair,” Jonathan says, lifting his free hand like he was going to touch him and then dropping it halfway. “It looks ridiculous right now I just want to –“

“What?” Steve asks, his mind running wild with possibility. “What would you do to my hair?”

Jonathan sits there with his mouth open for a few moments, like he’s fighting to keep from saying what he’s thinking. “Shave it,” he says.

Steve rolls his eyes. “That is definitely not what you wanted to say,” he replies.

“How would you know?” Jonathan says.

“I am a mind reader,” Steve replies.

“Oh yeah? What am I thinking right now, then?” Jonathan asks. Steve smiles sharply. He opens his mouth to reply and the phone starts ringing.

The two of them jump apart and stare up at the phone on his night table, breathless and somehow feeling like they have been caught out at something. Steve scrambles across the room and picks up the phone with a breathless, “hello?”

He pauses for a second, realizes it’s a telemarketer, and hangs the phone back up. He sits back on his heels, turning around and falling against the wall. He makes eye contact with Jonathan and says, “telemarketers.”

The two of them stare at each other for a moment and Jonathan looks wild, his hair ruffled up and his face red, his shirt still damp and wrinkled. Both of them burst into laughter almost simultaneously, giddy with disbelief.

Steve laughs until his stomach hurts, falling over sideways onto his carpet.

“What the fuck,” he wheezes. “What are we _doing?_ ”

Jonathan presses his forehead into his knees. “God, I don't even know.”

“Where is Nancy?” Steve says. “She should be here.”

“Oh god. I left her with Robin,” Jonathan says, head snapping up and bursting into laughter again, wiping a few tears from his eyes.

“Oh no, Robin is either making her listen to Russian recitations or threatening her life but also possibly both,” Steve says.

“We should go back out there,” Jonathan says.

“We should. And we should talk about… that,” Steve replies.

“With Nancy,” Jonathan agrees.

“I don’t know if I can actually go back down there and like, be a normal person right now,” Steve says. “Robin is going to mock me relentlessly for this, I feel like she’ll just… know.”

“Maybe put some clothes on,” Jonathan suggests. “That might help.”

Steve laughs brightly again. “I don’t know about that,” Steve says. “I think that may be more suspicious. She does know me, after all.”

Jonathan rolls his eyes. “You just want an excuse to walk around half naked some more,” he says.

Steve shrugs, shameless. “What can I say?”

Jonathan hits his head back against the wall, rolling his eyes. “Whatever, okay. Alright, I have to… I have to get up. We can’t just stay up here forever or they will come looking for us,” he says. As if on cue, the same stair that had tipped Steve off to Jonathan’s approach creaked again. A few seconds later, Nancy’s head peaks around the door frame.

“Are you two alright in here?” she asks. Jonathan and Steve both blink at her for a few beats and then start laughing again.

“Yeah, we’re cool,” Jonathan says. Nancy smiles.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay then. Yeah?”

“Yeah, Nance,” Jonathan says. She steps fully into the doorway, Jonathan’s t-shirt thrown on over her bathing suit and Steve… well, he really does not have anything to add to that.

“Where’s Robin?” he asks.

“She’s cutting up the pie, I offered to come check on you both,” Nancy says, coming in and sitting down on the edge of Steve’s bed.

“Oh, nice,” Steve says, nodding enthusiastically.

“So what is going on in here?” she asks, almost smirking at them both.

“We’re just chatting,” Jonathan says, shrugging.

“From very far apart, huh?” Nancy asks.

“The phone rang,” Steve says. Jonathan laughs again.

“Dude, is that a private line? Why did they not hear it?” Jonathan asks.

“Um,” Steve says, shrugging. “Maybe.”

“God, you are so rich,” Jonathan says, laughing. Steve smiles, a little embarrassed.

“Yeah, that’s true,” he says.

“Hey! Get down here, dinguses, or I am going to eat all the pie,” Robin calls up the stairs.

Nancy starts laughing and stands up, holding a hand out to pull Jonathan up. Jonathan then walks over and reaches out a hand to pull Steve up and Steve lets his hand linger a little once he is up.

“I am going to change,” Steve says. “Put some clothes on.”

“Yeah, alright,” Nancy says, laying a hand on Jonathan’s arm. “See you in a minute.”

They both head downstairs and Steve stands alone in his room contemplating for a second, staring at the wall of his room almost dazed. He shakes himself and smiles, heading for his closet.

Things were really changing, now.

\--

When Jonathan and Nancy say that they have to head out, Steve offers to walk them to the door. Robin stays behind with a wink and Steve sticks his tongue out at her.

At the door, Jonathan turns to him and says, “We have to talk before I go back home.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Steve says. “I work in the morning tomorrow and Robin works the night shift, so she will be at work if you want to come over then?”

“Sure,” Nancy says. She squeezes his forearm and kind of lightly pulls him down to kiss his cheek and then she glances at Jonathan, who leans in and kisses Steve on the other cheek. Steve feels like his face is on fire once again for just about the hundredth time today. 

“Bye, Steve,” they say, and they are gone in a flash.

Steve goes back into the kitchen and Robin starts laughing at him after literally one glance. “God, they have you messed up, huh?” she asks. Steve just sighs and practically collapses onto the counter top.

“Robin,” he says, face down. “What just happened?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing, Steve,” she replies.

Steve looks up, propping his head up with one hand. “Robin, when I tell you I do not know what just happened, I am not even kidding.”

“Well why don’t you tell me about it and we will see if we can parse the whole thing together, huh?” she says. Steve sighs.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Well, Jonathan came up, right? And we had this conversation which… honestly, it felt a little bit like I was hallucinating or something, it was just… it was like everything you have been teasing me about with them, you know? The whole thing.

“And then the phone rang so it kind of broke the moment or whatever, and then Nancy came upstairs. I guess… Well, I guess they talked about the whole thing? They talked about… me. And then you called us downstairs so we went down, and they kept, like, nudging at my ankles while we were eating and they would brush my hands when they passed things to me. And then… at the door,” Steve trails off again, running a hand through his hair.

“What happened at the door?” Robin asks, leaning even farther forward somehow.

“They,” Steve laughs a bit nervously. “We made plans for them to come over tomorrow so we could talk all of it out and then Nancy kissed me on the cheek and then. Then Jonathan did too.”

“Oh!” Robin says, standing up straight, looking delighted. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he says, trying to bite down on a smile.

“Bold!” Robin exclaims.

“You can say that again,” he replies.

\--

Getting through work is a nightmare because he can hardly focus at all, especially when Nancy and Jonathan come in with the kids to rent a movie. Steve has been even clumsier than usual all day, and Keith is sick of him within an hour.

Nancy and Jonathan seem to be sympathetic to his plight, but they also seem more than happy to continue teasing him.

Finally, Steve hisses, “Why are you here? I can hardly focus as it is.”

“We are letting the kids pick out a movie so that they don’t ask to come with us,” Nancy reasons. “Bribery will get us everywhere with them, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he replies. Will comes skidding to a stop against the desk.

“Steve, how did things go?” he asks in an undertone, making pointed eye contact with him. Steve smiles and reaches over to ruffle his hair and Will ducks his head away, swatting at his hands with a scowl.

“Hey, Will,” he says. “It went okay, don’t you think?” He looks to Jonathan and Nancy for their agreement.

“Yeah, I would say it went okay,” Nancy says. Jonathan just smiles and shrugs.

“Cool,” Will replies, and he darts off again to chatter away with the other kids, most likely gossiping about Steve if all of the glances they throw over their shoulders at them is anything to go off of.

Nancy laughs and Jonathan throws an arm around her, looking almost weirdly happy. Keith clears his throat pointedly from where he is shelving returns in the lobby. Steve rolls his eyes.

“Alright, you guys should probably start heading out,” Steve says. “If you stick around too much longer, Keith might actually lose it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jonathan says. “We would not want him killing you before we can have our conversation later.”

Steve smiles again, ducking his head down. “Right, yeah,” Steve says.

“And you will have to tell us all about when you told the kids and what they said, because I had no idea you even told them,” Nancy says. Steve shrugs again.

“We’re a tight knit group. They don’t spill my secrets and I don’t spill theirs. It’s a special bond that we share.”

Nancy rolls her eyes fondly. The whole group checks out and they are gone in just a few minutes and Keith only glares at Steve for about ten minutes after they leave.

Needless to say, Steve is watching the clock for most of his shift and he is pretty relieved when he is allowed to go home for the day.

When he does arrive home, he takes a shower and then agonizes briefly over what to wear and then decides he is being ridiculous since they have known him for years and seen him in all kinds of states, including covered in monster gore and wearing a shitty sailor’s uniform, so it doesn’t really matter what he wears in the long run. Still, he chooses to wear an outfit he feels good in, something that he thinks he looks good in. The embarrassing thing he would not admit to after if asked would be how many times he spun around in the mirror to check himself out.

He pops a tape in, the first mixtape Jonathan sent him all those months ago and he smiles, remembering the feeling he had when he opened it. He feels that same giddiness now, the nervousness bubbling up in his chest.

The doorbell rings and Steve practically buzzes out of his skin on his way to get the door.

Jonathan and Nancy are standing on the other side of the door and he really… well, he is kind of struck dumb by the sight of them there and the implication of them standing there. He steps back from the doorway and they come in.

“Hey,” Nancy says.

“Hey,” Steve replies, shutting the door.

Jonathan pushes a lock of Steve’s hair out of his face and Steve smiles shyly. He feels so different right now than he usually does in situations like this and he knows it is so incredibly different and that is why it feels so different, but he is still kind of struck by it.

“Is this my tape?” Jonathan asks, smiling softly. Steve feels his face heating up and shrugs.

“Yeah.”

“Will said the kids mentioned you listening to some new stuff, but it’s weird hearing it for myself. Good weird, though.

Jonathan looks equal parts happy and embarrassed and Nancy is smirking and not saying anything and Steve shrugs a little helplessly.

“I like all of them,” he says. Feeling his face burn even brighter, he admits, “I liked thinking about you making them for me.”

Jonathan laughs nervously, looking away. His ears have turned pink where they peek out from behind his hair and Steve is unbelievably charmed. Nancy leans into Jonathan’s side.

“Do you guys want anything to eat?” Steve asks, heading towards the back of the house and trying to shove down his embarrassment for a little while at least. “I have, uh, cereal I think? I have to go to the store again, I don’t know what we have.”

“Steve,” Nancy says gently, laying a hand on his arm. “It’s cool, we’re good.”

“Oh, alright. Good, um. Okay, well, we can go sit in the family room to talk.”

“Are you nervous, Steve?” Jonathan asks, voice soft.

“Yeah,” Steve laughs.

“Us too,” Jonathan says. Steve glances back and they’re holding hands. He smiles.

“Alright,” he says, sitting down on the couch. They each sit on either side of him, which complicates his thinking for a little while, but he wants so badly for this to go well that he manages to focus.

The biggest problem they all have is the logistics - you can’t do things like this in Hawkins. They wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.

“And what about the fall?” Nancy asks, twisting her lips up.

“Well, where are you going to school?” Steve asks. “Maybe we’ll end up close together?”

“I’m going to NYU,” Jonathan says. “And Nancy got into Columbia. We were going to get an apartment together. We’ve been saving.”

Steve perks up. “Robin got into Columbia too,” he says. “And I got into a community college in New York, so we were going to get an apartment together, too. That’s why I’ve been picking up so many hours at the video store.”

Nancy brightens considerably. “You got in? Why didn’t you tell us?” she asks, sounding genuinely excited. Steve flushes under her attention.

“I wanted to, but I was nervous about telling anyone!”

“We’re so proud of you,” Nancy says, putting both her hands on his knee and squeezing.

“Congratulations,” Jonathan says, soft in Steve’s other ear. He’s a little overwhelmed by it all.

“Thanks,” he says, blushing. “But Robin’s acceptance is way more exciting than mine. She’s going to study, like, language or something. She knows, like, five languages. And she likes books.”

“Linguistics?” Nancy asks. Steve snaps.

“Yes! That’s what she called it.”

“That’s really cool,” Jonathan says. “But your acceptance is still exciting too.”

“Thanks,” Steve says again.

“Maybe we could get places near each other,” Nancy says. “I don’t want to pressure you two into moving in with us, especially if you’ve already found a place, but we would love to see you both. Obviously. Things are different in New York.”

Her hands are still warm on Steve’s leg and Jonathan’s warm and steady against his side and Steve finds himself nodding.

It’s like the feeling he had after talking to Dustin, the feeling that everything was going to be okay in the end.

Later, Nancy kisses him on the mouth while Jonathan’s hand is wrapped around the back of his neck, and he realizes that those dreams he was so ashamed of could never hold a candle to this, not really.

Jonathan leaves in the morning and Steve’s parents are gone all week. The rest of the evening stretches out before them, full of possibility.

Steve puts a record on and stops thinking.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat Stranger Things (or 80's music) with me on [tumblr](https://sourbottlebaby.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/_sneganno).


End file.
